THE 

MORAL OBLIGATION 
TO BE INTELLIGENT 

and Other Essays 



/ 3 < 



BY 

JOHN ERSKINE, Ph.D. 

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH 
AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 




NEW YORK 
DUFFIELD AND COMPANY 

MGMXV 






Copyright, 1915, by 
DUFFIELD AND COMPANY 



NOV -6 1915 

^aA416259 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



The Moral Obligation To Be Intelli- 
gent 3 

The Call to Service 35 

The Mind of Shakspere ...... 73 

Magic and Wonder in Literature . . 119 



NOTE 

The title essay, originally read before 
the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Amherst 
College, is reprinted with the editor's 
courteous permission from the Hibbert 
Journal. The last essay also was read 
before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of 
Amherst College, and before the Phi 
Beta Kappa Alumni of New York City. 

In different ways the four essays set 
forth one theme — the moral use to which 
intelligence might be put, in rendering 
our admirations and our loyalties at 
once more sensible and more noble. 



THE MORAL OBLIGATION 
TO BE INTELLIGENT 



THE MORAL OBLIGATION 
TO BE INTELLIGENT 



IF a wise man should ask. What are 
the modern virtues? and should an- 
swer his own question by a summary of 
the things we admire; if he should discard 
as irrelevant the ideals which by tradi- 
tion we profess, but which are not found 
outside of the tradition or the profession 
— ideals like meekness, humility, the re- 
nunciation of this world; if he should 
include only those excellences to which 
our hearts are daily given, and by which 
our conduct is motived, — ^in such an in- 
ventory what virtues would he name? 

[3] 



THE MORAL OBLIGATION 

This question is neither original nor i 
very new. Our times await the reckon- 1 
ing up of our spiritual goods which is here 
suggested. We have at least this wisdom, 
that many of us are curious to know just 
what our virtues are. I wish I could oflFer 
myself as the wise man who brings the 
answer. But I raise this question merely 
to ask another — When the wise man 
brings his list of our genuine admirations, 
will intelligence be one of them.^^ We 
might seem to be well within the old 
ideal of modesty if we claimed the virtue 
of intelligence. But before we claim the 
virtue, are we convinced that it is a vir- 
tue, not a peril .f^ 

II 

The disposition to consider intelli- 
gence a peril is an old Anglo-Saxon 
inheritance. Our ancestors have cele- 

[4] 



TO BE INTELLIGENT 

brated this disposition in verse and 
prose. Splendid as our literature is, it 
has not voiced all the aspirations of hu- 
manity, nor could it be expected to voice 
an aspiration that has not character- 
istically belonged to the English race; 
the praise of intelligence is not one of its 
characteristic glories. 

"Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever." 

Here is the startling alternative which 
to the English, alone among great nations, 
has been not startling but a matter of 
course. Here is the casual assumption 
that a choice must be made between 
goodness and intelligence; that stupidity 
is first cousin to moral conduct, and 
cleverness the first step into mischief; 
that reason and God are not on good 
terms with each other; that the mind 
and the heart are rival buckets in the 
well of truth, inexorably balanced — full 

[5] 



t 



THE MORAL OBLIGATION 

mind, starved heart — stout heart, weak 
head. 

Kingsley's Hne is a convenient text, j 
but to establish the point that EngHsh 
Hterature voices a traditional distrust of 
the mind we must go to the masters. 
In Shakspere's plays there are some 
highly intelligent men, but they are 
either villains or tragic victims. To be 
as intelligent as Richard or lago or 
Edmund seems to involve some break 
with goodness; to be as wise as Prospero 
seems to imply some Faust-like traffic 
with the forbidden world; to be as 
thoughtful as Hamlet seems to be too 
thoughtful to live. In Shakspere the 
prizes of life go to such men as Bassanio, 
or Duke Orsino, or Florizel — men of good 
conduct and sound character, but of no 
particular intelligence. There might, in- 
deed, appear to be one general exception 
to this sweeping statement: Shakspere 

[6] 



TO BE INTELLIGENT 

does concede intelligence as a fortunate 
possession to some of his heroines. But 
upon even a slight examination those 
ladies, like Portia, turn out to have been 
among Shakspere's Italian importations 
—their wit was part and parcel of the 
story he borrowed; or, like Viola, they 
are English types of humility, patience, 
and loyalty, such as we find in the old 
ballads, with a bit of Euphuism added, 
a foreign cleverness of speech. After all, 
these are only a few of Shakspere's 
heroines; over against them are Ophelia, 
Juliet, Desdemona, Hero, Cordelia, Mi- 
randa, Perdita — ^lovable for other qual- 
ities than intellect, — and in a sinister 
group, Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, Gone- 
ril, intelligent and wicked. 

In Paradise Lost Milton attributes 
intelligence of the highest order to the 
devil. That this is an Anglo-Saxon read- 
ing of the infernal character may be 

[7] 



THE MORAL OBLIGATION 

shown by a reference to the book of Job, 
where Satan is simply a troublesome 
body, and the great wisdom of the story 
is from the voice of God in the whirlwind. 
But Milton makes his Satan so thought- 
ful, so persistent and liberty-loving, so 
magnanimous, and God so illogical, so 
heartless and repressive, that many per- 
fectly moral readers fear lest Milton, 
like the modern novelists, may have 
known good and evil, but could not tell 
them apart. It is disconcerting to in- 
telligence that it should be God's angel 
who cautions Adam not to wander in the 
earth, nor inquire concerning heaven's 
causes and ends, and that it should be 
Satan meanwhile who questions and ex- 
plores. By Milton's reckoning of in- 
telligence the theologian and the scien- 
tist to-day alike take after Satan. 

If there were time, we might trace this 
valuation of intelligence through the 

[8] 



TO BE INTELLIGENT 

English noveL We should see how often 
the writers have distinguished between 
intelligence and goodness, and have en- 
listed our affections for a kind of inexpert 
virtue. In Fielding or Scott, Thackeray 
or Dickens, the hero of the English novel 
is a well-meaning blunderer who in the 
last chapter is temporarily rescued by the 
grace of God from the mess he has made 
of his life. Unless he also dies in the last 
chapter, he will probably need rescue 
again. The dear woman whom the hero 
marries is, with a few notable exceptions, 
rather less intelligent than himself. When 
David Copperfield marries Agnes, his 
prospects of happiness, to the eyes of 
intelligence, look not very exhilarating. 
Agnes has more sense than Dora, but it 
is not even for that slight distinction 
that we must admire her; her great 
qualities are of the heart — ^patience, hu- 
mility, faithfulness. These are the qual- 

[9] 



THE MORAL OBLIGATION 

ities also of Thackeray's good heroines, 
like Laura or Lady Castlewood. Beatrice 
Esmond and Becky Sharp, both highly 
intelligent, are of course a bad lot. 

No less significant is the kind of emo- 
tion the English novelist invites towards 
his secondary or lower-class heroes — tow- 
ard Mr. Boffin in Our Mutual Friend, for 
example, or Harry Foker in Pendennis. 
These characters amuse us, and we feelj 
pleasantly superior to them, but we agree 
with the novelist that they are wholly ad- 
mirable in their station. Yet if a French- 
man — ^let us say Balzac — were presenting 
such types, he would make us feel, as in 
Fere Goriot or Eugenie Grandet, not only 
admiration for the stable, loyal nature, but 
also deep pity that such goodness should 
be so tragically bound in unintelligence 
or vulgarity. This comparison of racial 
temperaments helps us to understand 
ourselves. We may continue the method 

[10] 



I 



TO BE INTELLIGENT 

at our leisure. What would Socrates 
have thought of Mr. Pickwick, or the 
Vicar of Wakefield, or David Copper- 
field, or Arthur Pendennis? For that 
matter, would he have felt admiration or 
pity for Colonel Newcome.^ 

Ill 

I hardly need confess that this is not 
an adequate account of English litera- 
ture. Let me hasten to say that I know 
the reader is resenting this somewhat 
cavalier handling of the noble writers 
he loves. He probably is wondering 
how I can expect to increase his love 
of literature by such unsympathetic re- 
marks. But just now I am not con- 
cerned about our love of literature; I 
take it for granted, and use it as an in- 
strument to prod us with. If we love 
Shakspere and Milton and Scott and 

111] 



THE MORAL OBLIGATION 

Dickens and Thackeray, and yet do not 
know what quaHties their books hold out 
for our admiration, then — let me say it 
as delicately as possible — our admiration 
is not discriminating; and if we neither 
have discrimination nor are disturbed 
by our lack of it, then perhaps that 
wise man could not list intelligence 
among our virtues. Certainly it would 
be but a silly account of English litera- 
ture to say only that it set little store by f 
the things of the mind. I am aware that 
for the sake of my argument I have ex- . 
aggerated, by insisting upon only one ' 
aspect of English literature. But our 
history betrays a peculiar warfare be- | 
tween character and intellect, such as to 
the Greek, for example, would have been 
incomprehensible. The great English- | 
man, like the most famous Greeks, had 
intelligence as well as character, and was 
at ease with them both. But whereas 

[12] 



TO BE INTELLIGENT 

the notable Greek seems typical of his 
race, the notable Englishman usually 
seems an exception to his own people, and 
is often best appreciated in other lands. 
What is more singular — in spite of the 
happy combination in himself of char- 
acter and intelligence, he often fails to 
recognize the value of that combination 
in his neighbors. When Shakspere por- 
trayed such amateurish statesmen as the 
Duke in Measure for Measure^ Burleigh 
was guiding Elizabeth's empire, and Fran- 
cis Bacon was soon to be King James's 
counsellor. It was the young Milton 
who pictured the life of reason in V Allegro 
and // Penseroso, the most spiritual fruit 
of philosophy in Comus; and when he 
wrote his epic he was probably England's 
most notable example of that intellectual 
inquiry and independence which in his 
great poem he discouraged. There re- 
main several well-known figures in our 

[13] 



THE MORAL OBLIGATION 

literary history who have both pos- 
sessed and beHeved in inteUigence — 
Byron and Shelley in what seems our own 
day, Edmund Spenser before Shakspere's 
time. England has more or less neglected 
all three, but they must in fairness be 
counted to her credit. Some excuse 
might be offered for the neglect of Byron 
and Shelley by a nation that likes the 
proprieties; but the gentle Spenser, the 
noblest philosopher and most chivalrous 
gentleman in our literature, seems to be 
unread only because he demands a mind 
as well as a heart used to high things. 

This will be sufficient qualification of 
any disparagement of English literature; 
no people and no literature can be great 
that are not intelligent, and England 
has produced not only statesmen and 
scientists of the first order, but also poets 
in whom the soul was fitly mated with a 
lofty intellect. But I am asking you to 

114] 



TO BE INTELLIGENT 

reconsider your reading in history and 
fiction, to reflect whether our race has 
usually thought highly of the intelligence 
by which it has been great; I suggest 
these non-intellectual aspects of our lit- 
erature as commentary upon my ques- 
tion — and all this with the hope of press- 
ing upon you the question as to what 
you think of intelligence. 

Those of us who frankly prefer char- 
acter to intelligence are therefore not 
without precedent. If we look beneath 
the history of the English people, be- 
neath the ideas expressed in our litera- 
ture, we find in the temper of our remot- 
est ancestors a certain bias which still 
prescribes our ethics and still prejudices 
us against the mind. The beginnings of 
our conscience can be geographically 
located. It began in the German for- 
ests, and it gave its allegiance not to the 
intellect but to the will. Whether or 

115] 



THE MORAL OBLIGATION 

not the severity of life in a hard dimate 
raised the value of that persistence by 
which alone life could be preserved, the 
Germans as Tacitus knew them, and the 
Saxons as they landed in England, held 
as their chief virtue that will-power 
which makes character. For craft or 
strategy they had no use; they were 
already a bulldog race; they liked fight- 
ing, and they liked best to settle the 
matter hand to hand. The admiration 
for brute force which naturally accom- 
panied this ideal of self-reliance, drew 
with it as naturally a certain moral sanc- 
tion. A man was as good as his word, 
and he was ready to back up his word 
with a blow. No German, Tacitus says, 
would enter into a treaty of public or 
private business without his sword in his 
hand. When this emphasis upon the will 
became a social emphasis, it gave the 
direction to ethical feeling. Honor lay 

[16] 



TO BE INTELLIGENT 

in a man's integrity, in his willingness 
and ability to keep his word; therefore 
the man became more important than his 
word or deed. Words and deeds were 
then easily interpreted, not in terms of 
absolute good and evil, but in terms of 
the man behind them. The deeds of a 
bad man were bad; the deeds of a good 
man were good. Fielding wrote Tom 
Jones to show that a good man some- 
times does a bad action, consciously or 
unconsciously, and a bad man some- 
times does good, intentionally or unin- 
tentionally. From the fact that Tom 
Jones is still popularly supposed to be as 
wicked as it is coarse, we may judge that 
Fielding did not convert all his readers. 
Some progress certainly has been made; 
we do not insist that the more saintly of 
two surgeons shall operate on us for ap- 
pendicitis. But as a race we seem as 
far as possible from realising that an 

[17] 



THE MORAL OBLIGATION 

action can intelligently be called good 
only if it contributes to a good end; 
that it is the moral obligation of an in- 
telligent creature to find out as far as 
possible whether a given action leads to 
a good or a bad end; and that any sys- 
tem of ethics that excuses him from that 
obligation is vicious. If I give you 
poison, meaning to give you wholesome 
food, I have — to say the least — not done 
a good act; and unless I intend to throw 
overboard all pretence to intelligence, I 
must feel some responsibility for that 
trifling neglect to find out whether what 
I gave you was food or poison. 

Obvious as the matter is in this 
academic illustration, it ought to have 
been still more obvious in Matthew 
Arnold's famous plea for culture. The 
purpose of culture, he said, is ''to make 
reason and the will of God prevail." 
This formula he quoted from an English- 

[18] 



TO BE INTELLIGENT 

man. Differently stated, the purpose of 
culture, he said, is "to make an intelli- 
gent being yet more intelligent." This 
formula he borrowed from a Frenchman. 
The basis culture must have in character, 
the English resolution to make reason 
and the will of God prevail, Arnold took 
for granted; no man ever set a higher 
price on character — so far as character 
by itself will go. But he spent his life 
trying to sow a little suspicion that before 
we can make the will of God prevail we 
must find out what is the will of God. 

I doubt if Arnold taught us much. 
He merely embarrassed us temporarily. 
Our race has often been so embarrassed 
when it has turned a sudden corner and 
come upon intelligence. Charles Kings- 
ley himself, who would rather be good 
than clever, — and had his wish, — was 
temporarily embarrassed when in the 
consciousness of his own upright char- 

[19] 



THE MORAL OBLIGATION 

acter he publicly called Newman a liar. 
Newman happened to be intelligent as 
well as good, and Kingsley's discomfiture 
is well known. But we discovered long 
ago how to evade the sudden embarrass- 
ments of intelligence. "Toll for the 
brave/' sings the poet for those who 
went down in the Royal George. They 
were brave. But he might have sung, 
*'Toll for the stupid." In order to clean 
the hull, brave Kempenfelt and his eight 
hundred heroes took the serious risk of 
laying the vessel well over on its side? 
while most of the crew were below. 
Having made the error, they all died 
bravely; and our memory passes easily 
over the lack of a virtue we never did 
think much of, and dwells on the English 
virtues of courage and discipline. So 
we forget the shocking blunder of the 
charge of the Light Brigade, and proudly 
sing the heroism of the victims. Lest 

[201 



TO BE INTELLIGENT 

we flatter ourselves that this trick of 
defence has departed with our fathers — 
this reading of stupidity in terms of the 
tragic courage that endures its results — 
let us reflect that recently, after full 
warning, we drove a ship at top speed 
through a field of icebergs. When we 
were thrilled to read how superbly those 
hundreds died, in the great English way, 
a man pointed out that they did indeed 
die in the English way, and that our 
pride was therefore ill-timed; that all 
that bravery was wasted; that the 
tragedy was in the shipwreck of intel^ 
ligence. That discouraging person was 
an Irishman. 



IV 

I have spoken of our social inheritance 
as though it were entirely English. Once 
more let me qualify my terms. Even 

[21] 



THE MORAL OBLIGATION 

those ancestors of ours who never left 
Great Britain were heirs of many civiHza- 
tions — Roman, French, Itahan, Greek. 
With each world-tide some love of pure 
intelligence was washed up on English 
shores, and enriched the soil, and here 
and there the old stock marvelled at its 
own progeny. But to America, much 
as we may sentimentally deplore it, 
England seems destined to be less and 
less the source of culture, of religion and 
learning. Our land assimilates all races; 
with every ship in the harbor our old 
English ways of thought must crowd a 
little closer to make room for a new tradi- 
tion. If some of us do not greatly err, 
these newcomers are chiefly driving to the 
wall our inherited criticism of the in- 
tellect. As surely as the severe northern 
climate taught our forefathers the value 
of the will, the social conditions from 
which these new citizens have escaped 

[22] 



TO BE INTELLIGENT 

have taught them the power of the mind. 
They differ from each other, but against 
the Anglo-Saxon they are confederated 
in a Greek love of knowledge, in a Greek 
assurance that sin and misery are the 
fruit of ignorance, and that to know is to 
achieve virtue. They join forces at once 
with that earlier arrival from Greece, 
the scientific spirit, which like all the 
immigrants has done our hard work and 
put up with our contempt. Between 
this rising host that follow intelligence, 
and the old camp that put their trust in a 
stout heart, a firm will, and a strong hand, 
the fight is on. Our college men will be 
in the thick of it. If they do not take 
sides, they will at least be battered in the 
scuffle. At this moment they are readily 
divided into those who wish to be men — 
whatever that means — and those who 
wish to be intelligent men, and those 
who, unconscious of blasphemy or hu- 

[23] 



THE MORAL OBLIGATION 

mor, prefer not to be intelligent, but to do 
the will of God. 

When we consider the nature of the 
problems to be solved in our day, it 
seems — to many of us, at least — that 
these un-English arrivals are correct, 
that intelligence is the virtue we par- 
ticularly need. Courage and steadfast- 
ness we cannot do without, so long as two 
men dwell on the earth; but it is time to 
discriminate in our praise of these vir- 
tues. If you want to get out of prison, 
what you need is the key to the lock. 
If you cannot get that, have courage and 
steadfastness. Perhaps the modern world 
has got into a kind of prison, and what is 
needed is the key to the lock. If none 
of the old virtues exactly fits, why should 
it seem ignoble to admit it.^^ England 
for centuries has got on better by sheer 
character than some other nations by 
sheer intelligence, but there is after all a 

[24] 



TO BE INTELLIGENT 

relation between the kind of problem and 
the means we should select to solve it. 
Not all problems are solved by will- 
power. When England overthrew Bona- 
parte, it was not his intelligence she 
overthrew; the contest involved other 
things besides intelligence, and she wore 
him out in the matter of physical endur- 
ance. The enemy that comes to her as 
a visible host or armada she can still close 
with and throttle; but when the foe 
arrives as an arrow that flieth by night, 
what avail the old sinews, the old stout- 
ness of heart! We Americans face the 
same problems, and are too much in- 
clined to oppose to them similar obsolete 
armor. We make a moral issue of an 
economic or social question, because it 
seems ignoble to admit it is simply a 
question for intelligence. Like the medi- 
cine-man, we use oratory and invoke our 
hereditary divinities, when the patient 

[25] 



THE MORAL OBLIGATION 

needs only a little quiet, or permission to 
get out of bed. We applaud those leaders 
who warm to their work — who, when they 
cannot open a door, threaten to kick it in. 
In the philosopher's words, we curse the 
obstacles of life as though they were 
devils. But they are not devils. They 
are obstacles. j 

V 

Perhaps my question as to what you 
think of intelligence has been pushed far 
enough. But I cannot leave the subject 
without a confession of faith. 

None of the reasons here suggested will 
quite explain the true worship of intelli- 
gence, whether we worship it as the 
scientific spirit, or as scholarship, or as 
any other reliance upon the mind. We 
really seek intelligence not for the an- 
swers it may suggest to the problems of 

[26] 



TO BE INTELLIGENT 

life, but because we believe it is life, — 
not for aid in making the will of God 
prevail, but because we believe it is the 
will of God. We love it, as we love vir- 
tue, for its own sake, and we believe it is 
only virtue's other and more precise 
name. We believe that the virtues wait 
upon intelligence — literally wait, in the 
history of the race. Whatever is ele- 
mental in man — love, hunger, fear — ^has 
obeyed from the beginning the discipline 
of intelligence. We are told that to kill 
one's aging parents was once a demonstra- 
tion of solicitude; about the same time, 
men hungered for raw meat and feared 
the sun's eclipse. Filial love, hunger, 
and fear are still motives to conduct, 
but intelligence has directed them to 
other ends. If we no longer hang the 
thief or flog the school-boy, it is not 
that we think less harshly of theft or 
laziness, but that intelligence has found 

[27] 



THE MORAL OBLIGATION 

a better persuasion to honesty and en- 
terprise. 

We believe that even in rehgion, in the 
most intimate room of the spirit, intel- 
Hgenee long ago proved itself the master- 
virtue. Its inward oflBce from the be- 
ginning was to decrease fear and increase 
opportunity; its outward eflfect was to 
rob the altar of its sacrifice and the priest 
of his mysteries. Little wonder that 
from the beginning the disinterestedness 
of the accredited custodians of all temples 
has been tested by the kind of welcome 
they gave to intelligence. How many 
hecatombs were offered on more shores 
than that of Aulis, by seamen waiting 
for a favorable wind, before intelligence 
found out a boat that could tack! The 
altar was deserted, the religion revised — 
fear of the uncontrollable changing into 
delight in the knowledge that is power. 
We contemplate with satisfaction the law 

y [28] 



TO BE INTELLIGENT 

by which in our long history one re- 
hgion has driven out another, as one 
hypothesis supplants another in astron- 
omy or mathematics. The faith that 
needs the fewest altars, the hypothesis 
that leaves least unexplained, survives; 
and the intelligence that changes most 
fears into opportunity is most divine. 

We believe this beneficent operation 
of intelligence was swerving not one 
degree from its ancient course when un- 
der the name of the scientific spirit it 
once more laid its influence upon re- 
ligion. If the shock here seemed too 
violent, if the purpose of intelligence here 
seemed to be not revision but contradic- 
tion, it was only because religion was 
invited to digest an unusually large 
amount of intelligence all at once. More- 
over, it is not certain that devout peo- 
ple were more shocked by Darwinism 
than the pious mariners were by the 

[29] 



THE MORAL OBLIGATION 

first boat that could tack. Perhaps 
the sacrifices were not abandoned all at 
once. 

But the lover of intelligence must be 
patient with those who cannot readily 
share his passion. Some pangs the mind 
will inflict upon the heart. It is a mis- 
take to think that men are united by 
elemental affections. Our affections di- 
vide us. We strike roots in immediate 
time and space, and fall in love with our 
locality, the customs and the language in 
which we were brought up. Intelligence 
unites us with mankind, by leading us in 
sympathy to other times, other places, 
other customs; but first the prejudiced 
roots of affection must be pulled up. 
These are the old pangs of intelligence, 
which still comes to set a man at vari- 
ance against his father, saying, "He that 
loveth father or mother more than me, is 
not worthy of me." 

[30] 



TO BE INTELLIGENT 

Yet, if intelligence begins in a pang, it 
proceeds to a vision. Through measure- 
less time its office has been to make of life 
an opportunity, to make goodness ar- 
ticulate, to make virtue a fact. In his- 
tory at least, if not yet in the individual, 
Plato's faith has come true, that sin is but 
ignorance, and knowledge and virtue are 
one. But all that intelligence has ac- 
complished dwindles in comparison with 
the vision it suggests and warrants. 
Beholding this long liberation of the 
human spirit, we foresee, in every new 
light of the mind, one unifying mind, 
wherein the human race shall know its 
destiny and proceed to it with satisfac- 
tion, as an idea moves to its proper 
conclusion; we conceive of intelligence 
at last as the infinite order, wherein 
man, when he enters it, shall find him- 
self. 

Meanwhile he continues to find his 

[31] 



THE MORAL OBLIGATION 

virtues by successive insights into his 
needs. Let us cultivate insight. 

"O Wisdom of the Most High, 
That reachest from the beginning to the end, 
And dost order all things in strength and grace. 
Teach us now the way of understanding." 



[32 J 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

A COMMENCIJMENT ADDRESS 



AS I feel for a moment the wholesome 
jf"^ dizziness that is the penalty of 
mounting a platform above one's fel- 
lows, and as I look down at the young 
faces courteously lifted for my first words, 
I am aware of — what shall I call it?— of 
an enforced collaboration; suddenly I 
have a vision of other rooms filled with 
other young men, who wait, as you do, 
for the first words of the commencement 
speaker, and at once I feel a sudden 
sympathy with those other speakers, who 
desire, as I do, to translate the occasion 

[35] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

into wise and appropriate words. I see 
our various schools and colleges keeping 
their commencements with a single mind 
— the audiences all expecting the same 
address, and the speakers, however orig- 
inal, all delivering it. You expect, every 
graduating class expects, to be told what 
to do with education, now you have it; 
your school or college owes it to itself, 
you think, to confess in public the pur- 
pose for which it has trained you. I 
can almost hear the speakers, from ocean 
to ocean, responding in unison to this 
expectation in the graduates they face; 
the simultaneous eloquence is so in- 
evitable that I can follow it almost word 
for word; in fact, I almost join in. 

The speech they are delivering is known 
as the Call to Service. The substance of it 
is that educated men should be unselfish; 
that learning is a vain and dangerous 
luxury if it is only for ourselves; that the 

[36] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

following of truth, the reverent touching 
of the hem of her garment, is not, as we 
may have thought, a privilege, nor is even 
the love of truth a virtue, until it is con- 
verted into a responsibility toward others. 
Few of us care to challenge this teaching. 
We share in the will to serve, not merely 
as an annual attitude, but as a year-long 
passion, until it becomes our one au- 
thentic motive to good living — or, if we 
disobey it, a witness against us, incessant 
and uncomfortable. No wonder that at 
commencement time particularly, at a 
moment of success and hope, the instinct 
of the young graduate is to hear the call 
to service, and the instinct of the speaker 
is to sound it. 

Yet some of us hesitate. So long as the 
mind is enclosed within the happy com- 
mencement scene, the circle of well- 
intending graduates, affectionate parents, 
and earnest teachers, it is easy to say 

[37] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

"Come into the world now, young man, 
and begin your life-long service; your 
good fortune, your privileges, have set 
you apart, but other men, alas, are also 
set apart by the very lack of what you 
have enjoyed; now bring your plenty to 
their want." If our thought is centered, 
I repeat, on those whom we call into the 
world, this speech comes easy, but it 
sticks in our throat if we begin to think 
of those who, we say, are in need of 
service. Immediately a second and pro- 
founder vision rises before us — no cheerful 
reaction of commencement audience and 
commencement speakers, but a violent 
opposition between the fortunate who 
are preparing aid and the more numerous 
unlucky who presumably are preparing 
to accept it. What confounds us is the 
plain fact that only those who hope to 
render the service have the slightest en- 
thusiasm for it. We might well expect 

[38] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

also some due and ardent recognition, 
some rising to the moment, from those 
about to be served. Their need, to be 
sure, has no such focus, no such rally- 
ing-point, as the impulse to their rescue; 
no commencement address puts them in 
mind to receive, as you graduates are 
stimulated to give. But their need it- 
self, we might think, should at first pre- 
pare in them, and experience year by 
year confirm, a receptive and a thankful 
heart. Yet those about to be served are 
silent. If there are distinctions in si- 
lence, theirs leans less toward humility 
than toward defence. Those who have 
already been served and who now hear 
again the summons to their benefit, break 
silence by gradations of reproach. They 
deprecate the ministrations of the edu- 
cated. They invite the physician to heal 
himself. They intimate hypocrisy in 
their would-be rescuers, who, they say, 

[391 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

instead of equalizing men's misfortunes 
once for all, so that no further rescue 
might be needed, actually prefer to 
patch up life's injustices from year to 
year, finding a moral satisfaction in being 
charitable, and craving, therefore, a sup- 
ply of the unfortunate to exercise that 
virtue on. 

These criticisms, it seems to me, have 
too much truth in them. They throw 
us back upon our conscience, and force 
us to examine the motives with which 
we call others to service or answer the 
call ourselves. Is service truly a rescue 
or a profession? Do we hope to cure our 
neighbor's misfortune or to live by it.f^ 
Nothing could be more reasonable than 
that service should be judged by its value 
to the served, yet too often we practise 
this unselfishness as it were for our own 
good; we obey the call to service as an 
invitation to a salutary exercise of the 

[40] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

souL When the disturbing vision rises 
before us of half the race in need, and of 
the other half eager to help, we must 
withhold approval till we ask the eager 
helpers, "Do you look on the unfortunate 
as on your brothers, in temporary dis- 
tress, or do you see in them objects of 
charity? Do you think your function is 
to serve, and their function is to be 
served? If by a miracle they should get 
on their feet, would you have lost your 
career?" 



II 

If these questions seem rhetorical and 
strained, let me put them in other terms 
to several of you who presumably desire 
to be in the truest sense serviceable. 
My object, frankly, is to show that the 
life of service is often exploited in such 
a way as to come fairly within the range 

[41] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

of criticism, and that the men who sound 
the call to service nowadays and those 
who respond to it have often no right 
conception of what is serviceable. I 
should like to indicate what are the signs 
of true service and what are the signs of 
something else that masquerades in its 

name. 

I 

Some of you, doubtless, have decided 

to enter the Church. There was a time 
when the call to service was identical 
with a call to enter the religious life. 
Religion, the oldest, was once the broad- 
est avenue to good works, so broad that 
for centuries it included those two other 
main paths, now become quite secular — 
science and education; and with science 
and education it still provides the main 
opportunities for ministering to the soul, 
the body, and the mind of our fellows. 
Those of you, then, who contemplate the 
religious life, ought to be furnished out 

[42] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

of antiquity with a definition of the 
service you would render; you ought to 
know the nature of the benefit the lay- 
man comes to religion for, and how to 
assist him to that benefit. 

Perhaps you do not agree with me 
that you ought to know all this; per- 
haps, having felt a call to the ministry, 
you think the call justifies itself. As I 
speak, I see once more that ominous gulf 
between the server and the served. On 
one side I see you priests-to-be, loving 
your historical church, or your theology, 
or your revealed truth — loving, that is, 
certain gifts of God which you think you 
can prepare for by study, and receive by 
heavenly grace, and by your faithfulness 
transmit unimpaired to others after you; 
and your loyalty to theology or church or 
revelation you conceive to be service. 
On the other side of the gulf I see men 
waiting for real service at the hands of 

[43] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

the Church, and not getting it. If there 
is hostihty in the world to religion per se, 
at least that is not what I am talking 
about; I speak solely of those optimistic 
veterans in the pews who still expect the 
service of religion from the new arrival 
just out of the divinity school. 

They have a pretty clear notion as to 
what religion promises, and they grow 
impatient for the promise to be kept. 
Religion promises, in the old words, a 
more abundant life, an immediate as well 
as a distant benefit, an enjoyment to 
be entered upon in this present world. 
It would provide at once an exercise to 
develop the spiritual faculties we now 
have into powers we but faintly imagine. 
"More abundant life," to the religious- 
minded, is the phrasing of an old battle- 
hope, a more than ancient faith in his 
own sufiiciency to approach God, which 
individual man, in this sense forever 

[44] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

Puritan, has never entirely let go. Even 
when the priest in his primitive func- 
tion stood between the people and 
their deity, mediating by virtue of his 
superior gifts and training, the savage 
in his fear still had glimpses of a time 
when each heart should perform to God 
its vows and sacrifices, consecrated by 
the mere sharing in human life. "I 
will make him a nation of priests," 
promised Jehovah to Israel. The pro- 
gram of religion, therefore, is not to do 
away with the priest, but to bestow the 
priestly character more abundantly upon 
all men. 

Must I qualify my words, and say that 
this is only the layman's program of re- 
ligion? It seems to be different from the 
program of the loyal priest. He hopes 
to perpetuate his office for the good of 
more and more laymen; the layman 
hopes that the distinction between priest 

[45] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

and layman will disappear. The priest 
looks upon his office as destined to serve 
perpetually, and upon the layman, there- 
fore, as destined to be perpetually an 
object of service; but the layman hopes 
to need service less and less. How very 
disconcerting it would be for the Church, 
as it is at present organized, if all the 
laymen should become, in the truest 
sense, priests. Even if we grant that 
the organization conforms at present to a 
situation, yet we detect no wish on its 
part that the situation should be changed. 
In every denomination there seems to be 
a tendency to widen the gulf between 
priest and layman, honoring the first 
without ennobling the second. The very 
devotion which is the warrant of true 
religion, bids the layman look up, as to a 
higher order of being, to the holder of the 
priestly office. But when a man begins ' 
as it were to cherish holiness in another's 

[46] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

life rather than in his own, the mischief 
is done; religion then robs him of the 
very thing it promises to give. If we 
cannot find the illustrations close at hand, 
the book of history opens at the very 
places. Whenever the priesthood has 
been exalted as a separate ideal of good- 
ness or of wisdom, some integrity, some 
consecration, has been taken away from 
common men. In so-called Puritan mo- 
ments, when the priesthood has been 
least remote, the conduct of the average 
man has been most nobly severe; but 
where the distinctive holiness of the 
priest has been most devotedly cherished, 
the average man has needed a system of 
pardons and indulgences. No doubt the 
priests were holy, and were eager to 
serve mankind, but was it service that 
they actually conferred.^ It appears that 
no man can be holy for his neighbors; 
or if he persuades them to submit to the 

[47] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

experiment, the little holiness they have 
is taken away. 

Perhaps you have not thought of the 
religious life as involving these problems. 
"Going into the ministry" has perhaps 
meant to you simply a process by which 
you dreamt of getting a parish to work in 
and people to serve. Yet even in the 
smallest parish the division I speak of, 
the opposition between priest and lay- 
man, between the serving and the served, 
will be awaiting you. Do you dream of 
a congregation to help? Your congre- * 
gation dream of rising beyond need of 
help. Do you expect to be consecrated 
above the layman.^ The layman, who 
nowadays has a dialectic of his own, will 
ask how your consecration manifests it- 
self. If you explain that your superiority 
is not in you but in your office, he will 
press you to explain why the office, even 
if sacred, is necessary; he will ask 

[48] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

whether a system of superiorities and in- 
feriorities is vital to the religious life 
and whether, if all men were equally 
sanctified, the religious life would cease. 
You understand that this is but a 
figure of speech. The layman will not 
argue with you in this fashion; he will 
stay away from your church on Sunday 
and avoid your society during the week. 
If empty pews mean anything, he is 
resolved to escape your benefits, but for 
old time's sake he prefers not to quarrel 
with the minister. With religion he still 
has no quarrel, but the Church seems to 
him actually irreligious — well-organized, 
yes, well-meaning and well-behaved, even 
indefatigable in distributing warm clothes 
and wholesome food to the needy, yet 
also in spite of her gifts increasingly re- 
mote, strangely indisposed or incom- 
petent to share or impart the religious 
spirit. No wonder that, since it is 

[49] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

spiritual development he craves, he will 
give his allegiance to other organiza- 
tions than the Church. He sees that 
to join a parish for love of God comes 
to practically the same thing as join- 
ing it for love of the priest, to whose 
credit in a worldly sense an increase in 
the congregation is reckoned; he sees 
that against any criticism from the con- 
gregation the priest can and often does 
assert the authority of his office; he sees 
that though attendance at church will be 
counted as approval of the particular 
minister in charge, absence from church 
will be diagnosed as hostility to religion; 
and rather than accept the service of re- 
ligion on terms so compromising to his 
self-respect, he retires from the field and 
cultivates indifference. From this mood 
he is roused only when a loud call to his 
rescue excites his wrath. The reform, 
he thinks, should begin elsewhere. 

[50] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

III 

I have been speaking to those of you 
who, in love of service, may think of 
entering the ministry, and my purpose 
has been to describe that gulf be- 
tween your good intentions and the real 
needs of those whom you may have 
thought of as destined to be served. 
Yet others of you, I am aware, may not 
be stirred to repentance by the picture 
I have drawn; you may indeed be far 
from displeased by it. Perhaps you have 
left religion behind you, as an old-fash- 
ioned preoccupation of your grandmoth- 
ers, and whatever seems to be a criticism 
of it will confirm your complacency at 
having left it behind. You also are in 
love with service, but it is the call of 
science that you hear — real service, as 
you would say, without superstition or 
humbug. 

[51] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

Science does call you to a service of 
her own, but her program is perhaps less 
original than you think. Like religion, 
she would teach you an attitude of mind, 
an intimate approach to the universe. 
Like religion, science also urges you to 
good works; but whereas the rewards 
of religion are often indirect or deferred, 
science can appeal to your selfishness by 
showing an immediate as well as a re- 
mote profit. In this smaller, practical 
oflSce science might be expected even to 
surpass the service of religion, telling you 
how to make yourselves immune to 
disease, how to regulate your diet, how to 
choose your dress, how to keep the 
streets clean, how to secure sanitation. 
Science has far larger and more diflScult 
things to teach, principles and prospects 
of which these matters are the merest 
incidents; but out of her exuberant 
joy of service she freely bestows these 

[52] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

simple aids toward a more abundant 
life. 

Yet you can no more be scientific for 
your neighbors than you can be holy for 
them. If you persuade them to submit 
to the experiment, they will lose what 
little intelligence they had. Do we not 
see that the average man is more and 
more disposed to honor a few scientists, 
superstitiously exalting their skill into a 
kind of magic, and relying less and less 
upon himself .f^ For every service science 
has rendered, some common intelligence 
has been taken away. She gave us the 
barometer, and we ceased to be weather- 
wise; the almanac, and we forgot the 
stars. If this service from without left 
us free to apply our knowledge in other 
fields, there might be a compensation for 
the intelligence that has been taken away. 
But with intelligence departs the willing- 
ness even to be intelligently served, and 

[53] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

just as religion falls back upon threats of 
hell, so at last science calls in the police. 
If my house is ventilated and sanitary, 
it is not because science has made me 
intelligent, but because the expert to 
whom I have delegated my intelligence is 
now applying it on my behalf, with or 
without my consent. When my fire- 
escape was cast in the foundry, perhaps 
for the rescue of my life some day, they 
fixed in the mold a threat to fine me ten 
dollars, if ever I should block it up. 

However we may condemn the result, 
the intention to serve us is unmistakable. 
But science is strangely inconsistent. 
Having assumed the place of our intelli- 
gence, she develops what seems to be a 
startling indifference to our welfare. At 
times she surpasses the worst that has 
been charged against religion in the dis- 
position to fall in love with her own 
image. Since the middle of the nine- 

[54] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

teenth century, men at her invitation 
have contemplated their unsavory be- 
ginning and the myriad processes by 
which they are supposed to have escaped 
from it. They have not been greatly 
edified; kinship with the monkey, if 
true, is uninspiring. Into what nobler 
relations are we to enter .^ Science does 
not reply. The excuse is that science is 
collecting facts, or perfecting methods, 
or at best is occupied in remedial work, 
in solving problems of disease and in re- 
ducing the discomforts of life. Service 
so vast and so humane cannot be over- 
valued. Yet even in the region of this 
service, is not science frittering itself 
away upon methods, instead of setting 
before us the end.^^ And is it possible to 
estimate the value of the method, until 
we know the end? One scientist tells 
us, as a matter of fact, that our best days 
are over at forty. Much of the informa- 

[55] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

tion which science imparts is as cheerful 
as that. Another tells us how to prolong 
life, by drinking sour milk. But if the 
first doctor is right and our heyday is over 
at forty, why should we wish to grow old.f^ 
Our true benefactor would tell us how 
long we ought to wish to live. Or even 
when science is not so blind, it often sins 
by applying itself to an end it knows to 
be wrong. It invents vehicles of con- 
stantly greater speed, though it assures 
us that such acceleration is the ruin of 
our nerves. It invents methods of kill- 
ing people, and means of protecting them, 
though it persuades us at the same time 
— as if we needed persuasion! — that war 
is an awkward way of serving mankind. 
Those of you who heard with com- 
placence my criticism of religion ought 
not to protest if I bring the same judg- 
ment to bear on science. Indeed there is 
a fine irony in substituting the service of 

156] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

science for the service of religion as a tar- 
get for the fault-finder; for science, which 
began by pointing out the insufficiencies 
of religion, and gradually usurped relig- 
ion's place in this matter of serving man- 
kind, has also, it may be, taken to herself 
some of the frailties she once condemned. 
Between you and those whom you would 
serve through science the same gulf lies 
as between the priests and those they 
would benefit. The protest against sci- 
ence is not yet so loud, I grant you, 
as that against religion, but it is the 
same in kind, and it is growing. Scientists 
are as eager to do our thinking for us as 
ever the Church has been, they are just 
as ready to use force to make effective 
the truth as they see it, and they keep 
their scientific spirit to themselves as 
effectively as the priests keep their 
priesthood. They look upon themselves 
as a caste, and in the name of science 

157 ] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

they presume to dogmatise outside of 
their field, exactly as the priests once 
did. We, meanwhile, as profoundly de- 
sirous of magic as primitive man ever 
was, wait with awe upon the word of 
these latest magicians, or begin to grum- 
ble because they do not let us into the 
secret. We grow rich, it appears, in 
the results of science, but poor in its 
spirit. If the symptoms of this un- 
healthy condition were found only in the 
man in the street, there would be less 
need to worry, for that mythical person 
is by definition the first to get hold of 
applied results and the last to be in- 
terested in principles. But the criticism 
is justified in the places where science is 
avowedly engaged in handing on her 
torch — in your college, for example, where 
almost all of you studied the sciences and 
almost none of you was suspected by 
anybody of being scientific. The technic 

[58] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

of the laboratory instruments appealed 
to you exactly as does the management 
of a motor-car or the handling of a shot- 
gun; most young men like to use a 
machine and to get mechanical results. 
But as to learning the insatiable love of 
truth, the precise observation and the 
inexorable deduction which are essential 
in the scientist, you probably have not 
even made a beginning. 

IV 

I can imagine that some of you will 
be as little troubled by the insufficiency of 
science as by the shortcomings of re- 
ligion; you have heard the call to service, 
but you understand it as a call to teach. 
Observing that I am by profession a 
teacher, you probably think that I have 
saved up education for the end of my 
discourse as a happy contrast to those 

[59] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE ^ 

other ways of serving. The call to 
service does indeed seem to be a sum- 
mons to inquiry, whether of religion or 
science or any other region of faith or 
experience, and the life of inquiry might 
seem to be the life of a college professor. 
The college is supposed to be a place of 
precious leisure, in which truth may be 
sought without distraction. It is not 
directly practical nor serviceable; it is 
the gymnasium rather than the arena of 
the spirit. As its name implies, it is a 
collection of diverse minds and natures, 
strengthening their noblest impulses and 
their finest knowledge by a communal 
sharing. Into this charged atmosphere 
of the spirit a student enters, to learn his 
capacities and to develop them, as his 
teachers develop theirs, by this high 
trafiic of soul and soul. The service 
which the college can render is to keep the 
atmosphere properly charged — to see that 

[60] 



I 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

there are enough teachers and enough 
students, so that this interchange of 
character may be complete. The ideal is 
a byword — "Mark Hopkins on one end 
of a log and a boy on the other." 

The log, of course, is not necessary. 
It is only a convenience. But unfor- 
tunately the college is seized with that 
spirit of service which looks for quick 
results. Neither Mark Hopkins nor the 
boy can be organized and administered 
to serve any very immediate popular de- 
mand; it is the log, therefore, that the 
colleges have organized and elaborated. 
With the sincerest desire to be of service 
to the greatest number — if possible, to all 
who present themselves — they have ex- 
tended the log till some of the boys are 
almost out of earshot of Mark Hopkins, 
and for weak backs they have inserted a 
few bolsters. How narrow and unsym- 
pathetic sounds an extract from the re- 

[61] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

port to the trustees of Columbia College 
in 1810 on the state of instruction in that 
institution — "Your committee cannot for 
a moment suppose that it is the intention 
of the Board to try that most fruitless 
and mischievous experiment — the experi- 
ment of educating either the naturally 
stupid or the incurably idle." 

In justice to the modern educator who 
does not admit the existence of any such 
class as the naturally stupid or the in- 
curably idle, be it said that he lives up 
to his ideal of service, even to the for- 
feiture of that leisurely investigation and 
contemplation of truth which is the prime 
delight of the scholar. The log has not 
been easy to organize. The college pro- 
fessor has had to manipulate embarrass- 
ing entrance requirements, and make the 
curriculum pliable, and serve as preceptor 
to the near-idle and as adviser to the 
near-stupid; nay, having evolved this 

[62] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

system of dependence in intellectual 
things, he has carried it, in the spirit of 
service, into the amusements of the 
students, until he acts as director of 
their sports and treasurer of their gate 
receipts and sponsor of their business 
contracts. All this takes time. In more 
leisurely days the scholar would come 
from his meditations upon great truths 
like the prophet from Sinai, with the 
skin of his face shining. Now from a 
conference with student managers or 
from investigating the eligibility of the 
football captain he returns with that 
nervous step, that fretful eye, that 
palpable collapse of spirit, which an- 
nounce to his sympathetic colleagues, 
"I have served." 

Yet he would still have his reward, 
did his labors ennoble the served, or con- 
fer upon them a more abundant life. 
That the effect is otherwise might be 

[63] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

prophesied from a certain complacency 
in his sacrifice. If he looks down to those | 
he serves, if the angle of his condescen- 
sion is to himself the warrant of his well- 
doing, if football or the college dramatics 
be not really his career, but only an 
excuse for demonstrating to the young-^ 
sters that he can still revisit their point 
of view — then he has robbed them of 
what it is his profession to give; robbed 
them not simply in their greater de- 
pendence, in their lessening enthusiasm 
and ability to conduct their own af- 
fairs, but far more tragically in the de- 
feat of their right to live in the presence, 
and profit by the inspiration, of a 
scholar who follows with his whole heart 
the great quest of truth. Whether or 
not it is the students' duty to study, it is 
their right to behold the scholar at his 
work, and to imitate him; for it is by 
comradeship and imitation that they 

[64] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

share the teacher's life. But if the 
teacher keeps his scholarship out of the 
comradeship and the life which they 
share; if he manages his days as though 
scholarship were a solace of the leisure 
to be earned by service, or a hoarded 
treasure not to be rashly displayed — ^he 
will no more make others scholarly than 
a priest who conceals his holiness will 
make others holy, or a scientist who does 
not live his science will make others 
scientific. 



V 

It would be wrong to let you think 
that by entering any great profession? 
even my own, you will automatically 
enter the life of genuine service. With 
teaching, with science, with religion, I 
have no quarrel; I long ago gave my 
allegiance to all three, and it is from 

L65] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

noble priests and scholars and teachers 
that I have drawn the ideals here set 
forth. But while human nature remains 
what it is, there is a great temptation to 
mistake immediate results for the true 
ends, to impart the by-products rather 
than the vital principle, to think of our- 
selves as conserving the torch, instead 
of handing it on. The mass of man- 
kind are good-natured enough to let us 
treat them for a certain length of time as 
objects of charity, as destined to be 
served, but there is an end to their good 
nature. In religion this conclusion has 
already shown itself; in science and in I 
education the writing is on the wall. 
For that reason I hesitated to call you 
to service, lest you should understand 
the summons only in the familiar way, 
and by your enthusiasm should make 
the gulf wider between your ideals 
and your fellow-men. But to be truly 

[66] 



I 

^ THE CALL TO SERVICE 

serviceable is our loftiest ambition. The 
service we dream of is such education, 
such religion, such science, as will increase 
in all men the abundance of life. The 
method we dream of is such an illustration 
of religion or science or scholarship in 
our own lives as will increase in others a 
hunger for the same spiritual sustenance. 
To make this illustration, we must first 
cultivate religion or science or scholar- 
ship in ourselves. 

This is the statement of the call to 
service which I have been approaching 
slowly and with care, for to the generous- 
hearted it is on first acquaintance a hard 
saying. Seek truth or seek goodness for 
yourselves, if you wish others to have it. 
If you rise to your own stature, you will 
thereby perform all the service you 
could desire — ^you will help others to rise. 
Doubtless some of your neighbors will 
think you selfish. Doubtless the man 

[67] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

who buried his talent in a napkin was 
answering the call to service elsewhere. 
The sacrifice was his own concern, but 
the service so rendered must have been 
for the served also a lessening of spiritual 
wealth. True service lessens nothing. 
Not that the teacher should waste him- 
self in the enterprises of boyhood, but 
that even boys should fall in love with 
the enterprise of truth; not that the 
scientist should become a commodity- 
monger, but that all men should enjoy 
the high commodity of the scientific 
spirit; not that the priest should be 
secularized, but that by a race-wide con- 
secration man should become a nation of 
priests — this is the end of true service. 
For this we must be patient and with 
becoming care make ourselves ready; it 
is required of us only that we be produc- 
tive of good at last. For a thousand 
years of inspiration to unnumbered men, 

[68] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

how brief an investment are the forty 
years, or fifty, of the scholar's seclusion, 
the saint's discipline! Meanwhile the 
humble apprentice, so he be faithful, is 
even at the moment serviceable; for 
none of us can withdraw himself so far, 
but he will be still a ganglion of inspira- 
tion for all whose fate, by accident or kin- 
ship, is bound with his. We cannot too 
greatly desire to bring our fellows to the 
truth, but we may underestimate their 
own desire for it. When we ourselves 
seek it, every man who feels our contact 
will go with us. 

This is the true call to service — not, 
"The world is waiting for you — come and 
help it"; but, ''Are you fit to serve .^^ 
Do you know how to live your own 
lite? Either religion or science may be 
for you the City of God. If the ram- 
parts need rebuilding, take counsel of 

those ancient men who after long cap- 
Leo] 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

tivity raised again the walls of Jerusa- 
lem. Every man built in front of his 
own house." 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 



IN a recent guide-book to Shakspere 
occur certain questions intended to 
promote critical faculty in the student. 
"What amount of time," asks the writer, 
examining A Midsummer Nighfs Dream, 
"is covered by the entire action, accord- 
ing to the direction given at the beginning 
of the play? Show by references the 
time-scheme which seems to you to be 
actually followed." The student is here 
expected to perceive a discrepancy. Then, 
continues the questioner, "Why did 
Shakspere allow this discrepancy to re- 
main in the play.f^" Again, "Note cases 
of stichomythia, or dialogue in which each 

[73] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

speech consists of a single line. Is it 
effective in each case, or does it seem 
artificial?" And finally, "For what dif- 
ferent purposes, in this play, does Shak- 
spere seem to use blank verse, five-accent 
rimed lines, four-accent rime, and prose?" 
As we read these questions and others 
like them, beyond a doubt helpful toward 
a serious weighing of Shakspere's genius, 
they suggest perhaps a larger question 
which from time to time has troubled us 
all, and for which some of us have not 
heard the sufficient answer. They sug- 
gest the question of Shakspere's mind. 
They bid us ask once more, is his art the 
result of intention, or is there another 
explanation of it; and if there is another 
explanation, does this sort of catechism 
make allowance for it? In these familiar 
phases, — "why did Shakspere allow," 
"for what purpose does Shakspere seem 
to use," — ^in this echo of the formulas 

[74] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

most teachers unconsciously lean to, there 
is an implication which not a few lovers 
of poetry may care to challenge. Admit- 
ting that all the manifestations of genius 
are proper subjects for minute study, we 
may yet be fearful of the missteps of 
scholarship in the uncertain field of art; 
we may doubt whether any phrase which 
even slightly emphasizes the design and 
intention of the great poet's craft, does 
not follow as an unrecorded premise the 
critic's knowledge of his own rather than 
of Shakspere's mind. 

For we cannot too often recall that 
this man's fame, moving up through 
heavens of misty or pedantic adoration, 
has obligingly modified itself to the scope 
of the beholding eye. Whatever rest his 
curse procured for his bones, we have 
made chameleon work of his reputation. 
We have thought of him with Ben Jonson 
as an improviser, or with Milton as 

[75] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

fancy's child, or with Arnold as a solitary 
peak, lifting above us inscrutable, un- 
scanned. Nothing in this tradition would 
prohibit one more guess at Shakspere's 
mind. Yet in the newest explanation 
there will be a few things in common 
with those that went before. From the 
beginning the world has felt the natural- 
ness of this well-poised genuis; he never 
dwelt apart, starlike. No explanation 
will satisfy us which does not make 
Shakspere's mind a thing of nature — even 
a normal thing, in kind if not in degree. 
From the beginning the world has ac- 
knowledged the comprehensiveness of his 
imagination; at times so slight a barrier 
of visible art divides the life he saw from 
his representation of it, that life itself 
appears the medium of his thought. No 
explanation of his mind will satisfy us 
which does not make reasonable this 
godlike grasp upon experience. From 

[76] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

the beginning also there has been an 
adverse opinion of Shakspere's craft; if 
we are to beheve the extreme criticism 
of him, he never revised his work, he was 
sometimes careless of his grammar, he 
was sometimes all but indifferent to 
dramatic structure. Though the volume 
of his fame has more or less overwhelmed 
all fault-finding, no sincere attempt to 
explain his mind will neglect to bring 
even the rumor of his defects to a final 
account. 

The desirable explanation, therefore, 
will answer the question of his natural- 
ness, the question of his comprehensive- 
ness, the question of his imperfections. 
The well-known attempts to understand 
this elusive intellect have, however, usu- 
ally busied themselves with only one or 
two of these aspects. Such a partial solu- 
tion is in Hartley Coleridge's beautiful 
sonnet: 

[77] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

"Like that Ark, 
Which in its sacred hold upUfted high, 
O'er the drowned hills, the human family. 
And stock reserved of every living kind, 
So in the compass of the single mind 
The seeds and pregnant forms in essence lie 
That make all worlds. Great Poet, 'twas thy art 
To know thyself, and in thyseK to be 
Whatever love, hate, ambition, destiny. 
Or the firm, fatal purpose of the heart 
Can make of man." 

Helpful as the simile is, it illuminates 
only the comprehensiveness of Shak- 
spere's mind; it ignores the shortcomings 
of his workmanship and the limitations 
of his thought; it is inconsistent with 
perhaps any theory of his apparently 
natural inspiration. True, all men ob- 
serve, not the world outside, but them- 
selves — since what they see is at best 
only their conception of what they see; 
with this interpretation Shakspere's art 
may be said to consist solely in his ob- 
servation of himself. Yet this would be 

[78] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

to spin too fine Coleridge's already subtle 
thought. His meaning is clear enough; 
he would stress Shakspere's independence 
of knowledge gained by experience; this 
most precious intellect was freighted once 
for all with the infinite fortunes and as- 
pirations of the race, and — to exaggerate 
slightly — neither study nor thought nor 
travel nor age could add one little weight 
of knowledge. A mind so described is 
not the normal mind, as we know it, and 
in the description is no place for that 
fiavor of contact, that smack of im- 
mediate experience, which is the first 
mark of Shaksperian thought. 

Most of the criticism of our century, 
even of our own day, would explain 
Shakspere's comprehensiveness at the 
cost of his naturalness. German philos- 
ophy in the early years and German 
scholarship later have tried to establish 
a sort of standard of omniscience, against 

[79] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

which the poet's faults if perceived at 
all are measured as lapses from his true 
self. From Germany, though he denied 
it, the elder Coleridge learned to deal 
with Shakspere as with a god, whose 
mind was of a higher order than ours, 
yet might with labor be dimly learned; 
whose clearest utterance hinted at divine 
plans not in our fate to conceive, but 
only to admire; whose occasional vacu- 
ities meant no more than that the god 
perchance was sleeping or on a journey. 
"A nature humanized," Coleridge pic- 
tures Shakspere, "a genial understanding 
directing self-consciously a power and an 
implicit wisdom deeper even than our 
consciousness." Again, echoing the theme 
of his son's verses, he gives us this con- 
ception of a meditating, Coleridgean 
Shakspere — "The body and substance 
of his works came out of the depths of 
his own oceanic mind; his observation 

L80] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

and reading, which was considerable, sup- 
plied him with the draperies of his fig- 
ures." And again, ''He was not only a 
great poet, but a great philosopher." 

No more significant but probably bet- 
ter known is that passage in which 
Hazlitt subtilizes about the mind of 
Shakspere, saying nothing new, perhaps^ 
but setting an example in his phrase for 
the manner of question we noticed in the 
student's guide-book. "The striking pe- 
culiarity of Shakspere's mind," he says, 
"was its generic quality, its power of 
communication with all other minds, so 
that it contained a universe of thought 
and feeling within itself, and had no one 
peculiar bias or exclusive excellence more 
than another. He was just like any 
other man, but that he was like all other 
men. He not only had in himself the 
germs of every faculty and feeling, but 
he could follow them by anticipation, in- 

[81] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

tuitively, into all their conceivable rami- 
fications, through every change of for- 
tune, or conflict of passion, or turn of 
thought. . . . He turned the globe round 
for his amusement, and surveyed the 
generations of men, and the individuals 
as they passed, with their different con- 
cerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues^ 
actions, and motives — as well those that 
they knew, as those that they did not 
know, or acknowledge to themselves." 

Through this rhapsody how shall we 
approach the man Shakspere with human 
faults of speech and conduct; or how 
shall we see the roots of his genius in any 
faculty that is ours.f* 

This school of criticism might be called 
the philosophical adoration of Shakspere. 
In the soberer end of the nineteenth cen- 
tury we have had the scholarly adoration, 
a milder but no less devoted flame, as 
befits much telling of syllables and 

[82] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

matching of texts. To make the account 
somewhat brief — those who have studied 
the matter know that the chief furnish- 
ings of Shakspere's lodgings and of his 
theatres must have been the shelves 
crowded with his sources. Where an 
earlier version is not forthcoming, as in 
Love's Labor's Lost, we yet live in hope; 
if it be not found, at least some thesis 
will prove that it has been mislaid. We 
are supposed to know also that Shakspere 
was a lawyer, a doctor, an experimental 
psychologist, a sociologist, an aristocrat, 
a democrat, a moralist, a cryptic preacher 
of esoteric religion. To be specific, we 
observe, for example, that in modern 
society rich and idle families when they 
degenerate have a trick of announcing 
their end in one of two ways; the latest 
descendant sometimes reverts to the 
original vulgarity and common sense of 
the peasant who founded the line and 

[83] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

by dint of practice and the family for- 
tune becomes an almost eflScient, if un- 
economic, hunter or sailor or farmer; or 
the latest descendant inherits grace of 
manner, the cumulative breeding of gen- 
erations, but the exhausted stock be- 
queathes him nothing more, and he is 
at best a gentlemanly fool. This two- 
fold degeneracy the student of society 
teaches us to observe, — and lo ! Sir Toby 
Belch and Sir Andrew Ague-cheek. Or, 
to illustrate again, the old French poets 
had a definite type of lyric called the 
chanson d'auhade, or dawn song — the 
complement of the serenade, or evening 
song. A famous example of this type, 
the French scholar tells the French stu- 
dent, is "Hark! Hark! the lark," from 
Cymbeline, One other type of dawn song, 
the chanson d'aube, expressed the sorrow 
of two lovers who must leave each other's 
arms at daybreak. Among the marks of 

[84] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

this type are the man's anxiety not to be 
found by his enemies, and the woman's 
reckless desire to detain him if only for a 
moment. He tells her that already the 
birds of dawn are singing; she answers 
that he hears the birds of a darkening 
twilight. And of this type of French 
lyric there is one perfect illustration, 
Juliet's cry to Romeo, 

"Will you begone? It is not yet near day! 
It was the nightingale and not the lark.'* 

So Shakspere is become a research schol- 
ar, poor man! 

Or dare we dissent from all that this sort 
of criticism implies? Only two things ac- 
tually known of Shakspere bear on this 
problem; for other aids to the under- 
standing of his mind we should look not 
in books, but in life. We know that he 
was a man of action, a man infinitely busy 
with practical affairs, a man who pro- 

[85] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

duced several plays a year, and who 
could have no leisure. We know also 
that from the first he had a fluent gift 
of speech; he could say what he would, 
with the least possible impediment of 
language. But for the radical secret of 
his mind perhaps we should look in our 
own experience, if we would justify the 
hope that he was such a man as we are. 

II 

What, for instance, is the effect of his 
plays on us.f^ For one thing, we under- 
stand them, as we could hardly do if they 
were the work of superhuman intelli- 
gence. What audience was ever puzzled 
by a Shakspere play.f^ It is only the 
theories of his critics that perplex. Fur- 
ther, the plays seem to the audience to 
be miracles not of intellect but of obser- 
vation. No doubt the poet was thought- 

[86] - 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

ful; no doubt his mind brooded on life; 
but in his plays he gives the results of clear 
vision, not the results of clear thinking. 

Might we not find a clue to the secret 
in the behavior and expression of children 
before they are instructed as to what 
they ought to think and say? Who of 
us cannot recall at least one of their dis- 
concertingly apposite remarks f Their 
naive pronouncements share with great 
poetry the double effect of echo and sur- 
prise; we who hear have felt our way 
towards some such idea, yet when it con- 
fronts us we are startled. For highly 
conventionalized people, like Tennyson's 
spinster, children in their talkative moods 
are almost demoniacal, 

"a-haxin ma hawkward questions, an saayin on- 
decent things." 

But their youthful penetration is not 
solely a cause of embarrassment. Some- 

[87] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

times it shocks us to repentance for the 
unnatural state of mind into which we 
have grown. When Mr. Brocklehurst 
asked Httle Jane Eyre what she must do 
in order to avoid hell fire after death, she 
replied, "I must keep in good health, 
and not die." Why not, after all.f* We 
have been educated to a less natural 
answer. Sometimes this penetration is 
the very gift of prophecy. When young 
William Blake was to be apprenticed to 
a certain painter, the boy objected, saying 
that the man looked as if he were to be 
hanged. And the man later did come to 
be hanged. 

This faculty in childhood, which we 
can all illustrate for ourselves, appears 
to be nothing more than accurate, natural 
observation — an almost animal power of 
sight such as a fine dog or horse would 
have — and spontaneous, unretarded ex- 
pression. As we grow older, learning to 

[88] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

consider our thoughts we become con- 
ventional — that is, we train ourselves to 
see only what we expect to see. And 
learning to consider our speech, we limit 
our vocabulary; for the effect of taking 
thought is to curtail, not extend, our sup- 
ply of words. Because we are unsure 
of many a fine word, or because we are 
unsteady in its pronunciation, we or- 
dinary grown folk will not use it; and 
we hesitate to write it, forsooth, because 
of the spelling. Yet what energetic 
child, before he has been to school, ever 
stops for a word.^ Will he not make one 
up as he needs it, and pronounce it as 
he can, and by the same guidance spell 
it — very much in the way of that reckless 
word-user, William Shakspere? As to 
that unspoiled power to see true, some 
vestiges of it we grown folk perceive 
when upon meeting a stranger or seeing 
a landscape we feel an instant reaction, 

[89] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

an impulsive judgment which craves ex- 
pression, but which we stifle because we 
did not expect it. And a few seconds 
later perhaps some unconsidering person 
says the very thing, and wins a prompt 
acclaim. 

Is there not a hint of Shakspere in 
this.f^ To be sure, he was no child, but 
a mature man, educated to some extent 
in the knowledge of his time, if not in the 
profundities of modern scholarship. His 
associates were probably better educated 
than he, and his daily conference with 
them must have subjected his thought to 
a thousand influences of wisdom which 
we shall never be able to trace specifically 
among his "sources." Yet with all this 
maturity, can we not imagine a grown 
person with whom for the most part ex- 
pression has remained an instantaneous 
reflex of experience, who sees true habit- 
ually, as we less child-like folk do occa- 

[90] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

sionally, and who speaks so spontaneously 
that he takes no account of his utter- 
ance? He never blotted a Hne, if we be- 
lieve Ben Jonson; and even if we do not 
believe him, it is harder to prove that 
Shakspere's second thought is in any of 
the texts, than it is to conceive of his 
mind at its best as unspoiled by in- 
tention or reconsideration, like the mind 
of a child whose penetrating, unconscious 
criticism of life has not yet been ruined 
by blame or praise. With such a con- 
ception, the known facts of Shakspere's 
life cease to be puzzling. Hawthorne 
wondered that poetic genius could grow 
up in the small Stratford house, where 
there was no privacy. Probably Haw- 
thorne's meditative genius could not have 
grown up there, but for Shakspere's mind 
there could be no happier school. At 
all times and places his mental process 
was normal; he needed no privacy for 

[911 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

penurious inspiration, but in the very 
heart of noisy, roistering Southwark 
could reflect the life that crowded in upon 
him; and doubtless the lack of seclusion 
in his father's house fostered the gift. 
Indeed, privacy and leisure would prob- 
ably have meant starvation for his art. 
The fortunate conditions for the develop- 
ment of his energy and his naturalness, 
were a crowded and stirring environment 
and the necessity of ceaseless labor. It 
is no miracle that in a few years filled 
with distractions he produced in such 
rapid succession so many plays; had he 
enjoyed an unstimulating quiet, perhaps 
only by a miracle would he have pro- 
duced any plays at all. 

Shakspere's energy, which we assume 
as the prime fact in his character, is too 
generally conceded to call for proof. In 
the details of his career from the im- 
prudent marriage and the deer-stealing 

[92] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

to the purchase of New Place and the 
return to Stratford, he was a man of 
action fully occupied with affairs. Pro- 
fessor Wallace's recent contributions to 
our knowledge of his life in London, set 
him still more clearly in this light. But 
his writing might teach us as much with- 
out the help of the biographers. Great 
energy, strong interest, whether a man 
be very happy or very angry, results in 
vividness of imagination and felicity of 
speech. Shakspere's writing further re- 
minds us that it is too much to expect 
even him to live invariably in a tense, 
reacting frame of mind, wherein life is 
observed and created with infallible en- 
ergy. Many a dull and self-conscious 
passage — ^if we may be forgiven for ob- 
serving them! — is witness to his relaxed 
moments. Yet it would not be difficult 
to argue that his best work was done in 
his busiest years. That he mingled with 

[93] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

other men in a companionable way, with- f 
out much hint that he or they thought 
him more than a genial, frank comrade, 
is no paradox, but the inevitable conse- 
quence of his interest in life and his en- 
ergy ; nor should we wonder that his fam- 
ily remembered him in the death record 
as a gentleman, not as the world's greatest 
poet. His business was to live, not to 
write. That we have his plays now, 
means only that poetry is the most en- 
during reaction to life. He illustrates 
the usually forgotten truth that the 
greatest poets, normal and not too con- 
scious of themselves, are men of action. 
Like Dante or Milton or Scott, he 
responded to life in other ways than 
through poetry — only he set so great 
value on the other ways and so little 
on the poetry that we are forced to think 
him the least conscious and most naive 
of artists. 

[94] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

If his unconscious energy illuminates 
his vast accomplishment, it throws light 
as well upon his narrowest limitation. 
Since his genius at its typical moments 
reflected life in spontaneous, uncalculat- 
ing speech, no wonder that his horizon 
was narrowly bounded by human birth 
and death. His thought attempted no 
other world, no other life, than this. 
His mind could not react happily on 
what could not be physically seen. 
Dante's imaginings or Milton's were 
therefore impossible to his temperament; 
indeed, the casual questions of any 
serious-minded contemporary of his as 
to a future existence were to him it 
seems strange and forbidding. In Ham- 
let and Measure for Measure, those dark 
adventures in the borderland of death, 
the practical wisdom of life is profound, 
but the brooding upon the hereafter is 
child-like, with a child's respect for angels 

[95] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

and devils, and a more certain dread 
of ghosts and of being alone in the dark. 
The other fact of Shakspere's equip- 
ment which needs no proof is his gift of 
language. Distinction must be made of 
course between his natural endowment 
and the felicitous word-play which he 
shared with his contemporaries. It was 
a languaged age. What Shakspere owed 
to Euphuism is known to all students of 
his style. The fashion of fine cadences 
helped him to many a much-commen- 
taried line, sounding and shallow, like 

"And peace proclaims olives of endless age," 

or taught him such a flawless stretch 
of song as satisfies us though we forget 
the allusion — 

"And the imperial votaress passed on 
In maiden meditation fancy-free," 

or shorter phrases, now proverbial, like 

[96] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

"Sweets to the Sweet," 

"More sinned against than sinning." 

In these felicities, however, Shakspere 
surpassed but httle the other poets of 
his time, who improved their vocabu- 
lary and style, as we nowadays would 
do, by taking thought. Any one with 
an ordinary ear for word-music could 
effect some such happy combinations of 
sound. If he should occasionally miss 
the mark, so also did Shakspere; im- 
mediately before and after these quoted 
lines occur others far less happy. That 
he excelled at all in the practice of 
Euphuism, that he had a higher average 
of happy lines to his credit than others 
in that fashion, is proof only of his 
delight in language for its own sake — a 
delight that is common in some degree 
to all poets. 

Even in the highly Euphuistic pas- 

[97] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

sages, however, with aUiteration and 
balance and the other artifices of style, 
some magic word often lives with the 
Shaksperian vitality. Among the "w's" 
and the "I's" and the "k" sounds of 
the following most familiar lines, the 
verb which gives the picture has an 
eerie detonation, a charm that it never 
wore in any other employment — 

"On such a night 
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand 
Upon the wild sea bank, and waft her love 
To come again to Carthage." 

The distinction of Shakspere's lan- 
guage at its best is its extraordinary 
vitality. Words to most men are list- 
less things, to be combined into station- 
ary forms of thought or color. But in 
the Shaksperian word there is always a 
certain astonishment, a new approach, 
whether or not the word has been familiar 
before — 

[98] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

"In the dead vast and middle of the night." 

"Nothing of him that doth fade 
But doth suffer a sea-change.'^ 

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale 
Her infinite variety." 

Does not the secret of this imaginative 
speech he in the poet's clearness of 
vision and in his immediateness and ac- 
curacy of expression? Such words can- 
not be found by careful search in one's 
vocabulary; they are found, if at all, 
in the thing contemplated, when the 
energy of the poet's nature provides — 
to take a liberty with his own phrase — 
that the firstlings of his sight shall be 
the firstlings of his speech. To a degree 
children have this spontaneous felicity, 
at least as long as they keep a naive 
approach to language. Until they are 
spoiled by self-consciousness they do not 
think the words — they see them, as 

[99] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

something new and wonderful. Certain 
child-like ages, notably the Elizabethan, 
have rediscovered language, have toyed 
with it and manipulated it, — even dis- 
torted it; and Shakspere, the supreme 
child of a child-like age, when his in- 
terest was diverted from word-play to 
the spectacle of life, energized that life 
with unreflecting abandon into language 
curiously haphazard and uneven, but 
at its best a matchless symbol or in- 
carnation of life itself. 



Ill 

The theory of Shakspere's mind which 
is here put forth seems to find two ob- 
jections. The sonnets, which follow a 
contemporary fashion in a set literary 
form, can hardly be accounted for as the 
unconscious product of the naive con- 
templation of life. And in the plays 

[100] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

there seems to be constant though un- 
even evidence of design, and in the later 
plays especially the poet seems to speak 
as a philosopher, passing conscious ver- 
dicts upon life. It was this philosophical 
matter that led Coleridge and his school 
to see in Shakspere a profound nature. 

This paper does not intend, of course, 
to announce the great dramatist as a sort 
of automaton, who had no sense of the 
quality or purport of his work. In the 
sonnets and the early plays Shakspere is 
artificially self-conscious. But he is the 
most uneven of great writers; even in his 
artificial moments he is capable of naive 
utterance, of that penetrating truth 
which is his characteristic; on the other 
hand, in his noblest passages of this sort 
he sometimes indulges in palpable tricks 
of style or artifice of idea. Without 
raising the mooted questions of the son- 
nets, we can agree with those many 

[101] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

critics who have found in them some of 
Shakspere's happiest phrases; whatever 
else they are, they are born of a nature 
in love with fine speech. If we study 
the style of the sonnets at all, however, f 
it is only fair to reckon with the style 
of all of them — not simply to dwell 
upon the most felicitous, in the habit of 
the Shaksperian fanatics. At least, it is 
only fair to reckon with them all if we 
are to use them as indications of the 
poet's mind. The series has had its fame 
from a bare dozen of really splendid 
sonnets, much helped by the dramatic 
story which seems to be their back- 
ground, and which may or may not be 
autobiography. It is hard not to think 
that the noblest of these poems are direct 
reflections of life; yet it does not follow 
that the whole story is. On the con- 
trary, there are rather more sonnets of 
an artificiality so great as to raise the 

[102] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

doubt whether the poet knew anything 
of love at aU. Did the imagination that 
fashioned the Dark Lady, or uttered the 
terrible curse of lust, or the superb 
praise of friendship and of the "marriage 
of true minds," equally indulge in chop- 
logic? The examples are familiar. To 
choose one — 

"If I love thee, my loss is my love's gain, 
And losing her, my friend hath found that loss; 
Both find each other, and I lose both twain, 
And both for my sake lay on me this cross. 
But here's the joy; my friend and I are one; 
Sweet flattery! Then she loves but me alone." 

Or the whole of the following sonnet, 
with its amazing artifice — 

"When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see, 
For all the day they view things unrespected; 
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee. 
And darkly bright are bright in dark directed. 
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make 

bright. 
How would thy shadow's form form happy show 

[103] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

To the clear day with thy much clearer light. 
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so! 
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made 
By looking on thee in the living day, 
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade 
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth 

stay! 
All days are nights to see till I see thee, 
And nights bright days when dreams do show 

thee me." 

If this sort of writing indicates anything 
of the writer's mind, it tells us that he 
was practising the devices of style with 
great ingenuity. The human experience 
contained in the poem, however, is 
hardly what his admirers would like to 
call Shaksperian. Nor does it aid them 
greatly to say that here Shakspere was 
learning his craft. What craft .^ The 
use of language .f^ Perhaps, — though he 
used language less and less often in this 
fashion. But how is this sort of hair- 
splitting a training for his knowledge of 
life.f^ What is the connection between 

[104 ] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

these lines and Hamlet's words with 
Horatio — 

"Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that 
he sings at grave-making? 
"Horatio. Custom hath made it in him a 

property of easiness. 
"Hamlet. 'Tis e'en so: the hand of Httle 
employment hath the daintier sense." 

Or if the sonnets and early plays of 
Shakspere were a training for his art, 
how comes it that even in the mature 
plays he slips into unfinished and un- 
distinguished passages? It is usual to 
say that in the later work his thought 
overbalanced his speech, at times to the 
confusion of both; but it would be easier 
to suppose that throughout his life his 
moments of energetic vision alternated 
with very ordinary states of conscious- 
ness, and that he had little sense of the 
value of one condition over the other. 
The sonnets clearly echo older plots and 

[105] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

older sonnet series. It is impossible 
to prove them autobiographical as a 
whole. Yet it is just as difficult to deny 
the similitude of personal experience in 
the great sonnets. Shakspere followed 
the sonnet fashion, as he followed other 
fashions, doing only what others had 
done, but doing it better, with more 
energy; and in the process he lights up 
unexpected and amazing areas of truth. 
To say that in his later plays the 
thought overbalances the language, is to 
raise the main question as to whether 
Shakspere was a thinker at all. Accord- 
ing to the theory of his mind here ad- 
vanced, he was not. Except for his 
characteristic moments in which he 
flashes life into words, he is curiously 
conventional and timid. Though he fol- 
lowed the daring Marlowe and was the 
contemporary of Bacon, he never ven- 
tured out of the most conservative, even 

[106] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

non-committal, attitudes toward religion 
and learning and the established profes- 
sions. The endings of many of his plays 
and the initial circumstances of others, 
completely ignore the logic of the plot 
and of the characters; he is content 
that the scene should open and close 
upon artificial situations, but while the 
story is in motion he vitalizes it with 
his naive energy. If he is the greatest of 
world-dramatists, is he not also the play- 
wright who has taught least to posterity .^^ 
He did with supreme excellence what 
had been done before him, but added 
practically nothing to the craft of the 
theatre; the modern dramatist goes to 
other men for technical instruction. 

If Shakspere was a thinker, he must 
have accepted the conclusions of his own 
wisdom; if he did not know when he 
uttered wisdom, he was hardly a thinker. 
It is easier to take the latter conclusion, 

[107] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

though the admiring school have implied 
that Shakspere knew his own profundity, 
but carried the secret to his grave. The 
difficulty with that explanation is that 
it makes Shakspere practically omnis- 
cient. The Baconian heresy and other 
attempts to explain him, have been 
attempts to explain the author that 
Coleridge and the Germans found in the 
plays. Foolish as is the doctrine that 
Bacon could write and produce these 
dramas and have the secret kept for 
two centuries, it is really wiser than the 
belief that Shakspere could have been 
consciously omniscient, and yet keep the 
secret to himself — ^nay, even write a great 
many shallow things to hide the fact. 

To be sure, almost every phase of 
earthly life is glanced at in the plays. 
Yet this does not prove that Shakspere 
thought about any of them; he merely 
observed them. For example, the fa- 

[108] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

vorite memory of our first acquaintance 
with political economy is that question 
about what sort of society we would 
establish if cast upon a desert island. In 
The Tempest, when the King of Naples 
and his courtiers find themselves on what 
they think is a deserted island, they 
argue this very question. Says Gonzalo, 

"Had I plantation of this very isle, my lord — 



I' the commonwealth I would by contraries 
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic 
Would I admit; no name of magistrate; 
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty. 
And use of service, none; contract, succession. 
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; 
No use of metal, corn, or wine or oil; 
No occupation; all men idle, all; 



All things in common nature should produce 
Without sweat or endeavor; treason, felony. 
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine. 
Would I not have; but nature should bring 

forth. 
Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance. 
To feed my innocent people." 

[109] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

Now are we to believe that Shakspere here 
anticipates and pokes fun at the specula- 
tions of political economy, or that having 
this group of men upon a desert island 
he perceives the possibilities of the spec- 
ulation, and puts into Gonzalo's mouth a 
translation of words used with another 
reference by Montaigne? 

So with those curious coincidences 
which are strewn through the dramas. 
The poet has a trick — say some critics — 
of putting into the first words of the 
leading persons a clue to their characters. 
When Romeo says, "Is the day then so 
young," we are to see in him the embodi- 
ment of youth. It is easy enough to 
find marvels of this sort in Shakspere — 
perhaps in every poet. The themes of 
this same play of Romeo and Juliet may 
be said to be the conflict of Youth with 
Age — Age having forgotten what young 
love is like; and also the conflict of 

[110] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPEEE 

Love with Hate — Hate being expressed 
in the feud, which in turn is incarnate in 
Tybalt. It is easy enough for us to 
think of the story in these terms, but 
did Shakspere so think of it while writing 
it? and did he summarize the themes 
intentionally in a passage at the end of 
Act I? Capulet speaks first, doubtless 
representing Age — 

"Nay, sit, nay, sit, good cousin Capulet, 
For you and I are past our dancing days: 
How long is't now since last yourself and I 
Were in a mask? 

Second Capulet. By'r lady, thirty years. 

Cap. What, man! 'tis not so much, 'tis not so 

much: 
'Tis since the nuptial of Lucentio, 
Come pentecost as quickly as it will. 
Some five and twenty years : and then we masked. 
Sec. Cap. 'Tis more, 'tis more: his son is elder, 

sir; 
His son is thirty. 

Cap. Will you tell me that.? 

His son was but a ward two years ago." 

(Ill] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

Immediately Romeo speaks, representing 
Youth and Love — 

"What lady is that, which doth enrich the hand 
Of yonder knight? 

Serving-man. I kaow not, sir. 

Rom. O, she doth teach the torches to burn 
bright! 
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night 
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear; 
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear! 
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows. 
As yonder lady o'er her fellows shows. 
The measure done, I'll watch her place of stand. 
And, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand. 
Did my heart love till now.^* forswear it, sight! 
For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night." 

Now enters Tybalt, who personifies the 
last theme, Hate — 

"This, by his voice, should be a Montague. 
Fetch me my rapier, boy." 

It makes all the difference whether we 
believe that Shakspere consciously in- 
serted these designs or patterns in his 
work, or that they are there because they 

[1121 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

are in life, and the poet, reflecting life, 
mirrored more than he knew. The chan- 
son d'aube and the aubade are in old 
French literature, but Shakspere never 
found them there; he found them, where 
the old French poets found them, in a 
dramatic situation of real life. Hamlet 
was the victim of heredity; the conflict 
of the vacillating mother and of the 
downright father was in him; yet Shak- 
spere only perceived in life what we have 
perceived there also and have learned 
to call heredity. When Macbeth says 
that he has murdered sleep, and we 
trace through the play the remorseful 
sleeplessness which finally drives Lady 
Macbeth to suicide, we may call Shak- 
spere a criminal psychologist if we choose, 
but he only observed what we have 
classified. He saw that we are such 
stuff as dreams are made of, but he 
probably would not have agreed with 

[113] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

Bishop Berkeley. These designs in Shak- 
spere are true and recognizable, but they 
are coincidences, like the Dipper in the 
heavens ; we cannot think that a supreme 
intelligence marshalled planets and stars 
to illustrate a kitchen utensil. 

IV 

This view of Shakspere may seem to 
belittle him, as reducing his work to the 
improvisations of a child. The kingdom 
of heaven was once thought to be for 
aristocracy of intellect, and some of us 
think as much of the kingdom of poetry; 
but there is good authority for believing 
that they are both open to the imagina- 
tive, to those who can be unconscious 
of self as little children. Great intellect 
alone cannot force its way in, and it is 
the part of intelligence to recognize that 
fact. There is, of course, no reason 

[114] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

why great intellect and great poetic 
faculty — the ability to reason and the 
ability to see and feel and speak — should 
not meet in the same person. They did 
so meet in Sophocles and in Euripides. 
But it seems that they did not so meet 
in Shakspere, and perhaps it is only a 
wilful praise of the poet of our own 
tongue that would call him, on the whole, 
the equal of the Greek dramatists. 

If we make an intelligent distinction, 
however, between logical or analytical 
power and the poetic gift, then this 
theory of Shakspere's naive mind is not 
without hope for a richer conception of 
the nature of poetry. Shakspere's crit- 
ics have measured themselves in their 
measure of him. Milton, who prayed 
that his own lips might be touched with 
fire from off the sacred altar, beheld in 
the dramatist a secular, somewhat sec- 
ondary, prophet of the same ineffable 

[115] 



THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE 

inspiration. Coleridge, philosopher and 
dreamer, never a man of action, saw in 
Shakspere a Prospero, a magician, con- 
trolling the ends of life by study and fore- 
thought. Arnold, the self-reliant, some- 
what estranged servant of culture, ex- 
pecting or desiring from men neither 
comprehension nor contact, imaged the 
poet in the unattainable, unguessed-at 
height. And if with another attitude we 
perceive in the mind of Shakspere only 
the most fortunate occurrence of quali- 
ties common to all men — only the eye 
to see, the heart to feel, the tongue to 
speak, and the absence of that over- 
caution which ceases to live when it 
stops to think — may it not be that our 
age, with all its sophistication, conscious- 
ly aspires to the immediateness and the 
simplicity of life, and to that poetry 
which is not the accomplishment but 
the essence of life.^^ 

[116] 



MAGIC AND WONDER IN 
LITERATURE 



MAGIC AND WONDER IN 
LITERATURE 



WIDELY as we all differ in know- 
ledge and in opinions, one general 
account of life we are supposed as edu- 
cated men to accept. We are supposed 
to agree that we live in a universe of 
order; that every effect, though to us un- 
explained, has proceeded from a cause, 
and that the same causes operate faith- 
fully at all times. If it is the out- 
ward world that engages us, we are sup- 
posed to perceive that the stars which 
seem to wander, nevertheless are true to 
their courses; that no wind bloweth 
where it listeth, for we do know whence 

[119] 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

it comes and whither it goes; that the 
flood and the earthquake, once monsters 
of caprice, are now phenomena of obedi- 
ence; that even chance has its law. If we 
look inward upon our reason, our emo- 
tions, our instincts, we are supposed to see 
that the mind, like other instruments, can 
be controlled, and that its relation to the 
outer world is so much the same in all 
men that we can speak of colors or of 
sounds, can frame a syllogism, express a 
desire, distinguish between the abstract 
and the concrete, and be understood. 
Finally, if our concern is with morals, 
we are supposed to conclude that since 
ideas and emotions are an established cur- 
rency among men, personality must be 
something constant and reliable. Know- 
ing a man's mind and his character, 
we can predict that in a given situa- 
tion he will think thus and behave so 
and so ; and conversely, from the opinions 

[120] 



IN LITERATURE 

uttered or the conduct adopted in a 
given situation, we can infer the character 
of a stranger. It seems that law of one 
kind or another is the condition on which 
we live, and that we illustrate as superb 
a logic as do the planets above us. 

Whether or not there are dissenters 
from this account of the universe, at 
least we may fairly say that this account 
is the basis of most thinking to-day. 
It is accepted, of course, with humility. 
Even within the limits of our powers, 
we have as yet gained far less con- 
trol of experience than our intellectual 
self-respect demands. We still blunder 
through life as though we did not know 
that the great game must be played ac- 
cording to the rules. But at least we 
admit that there are rules, and that 
when man has learned them, he will find 
the game much easier and happier to 
play. Having made this admission, how- 

[121] 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

ever, it is to be feared that we forget 
our humility and become self-satisfied. 
This orderly definition of the universe, we 
reflect, is something of an achievement, 
and we assume that it is peculiarly our 
own. The Greeks, to be sure, and a few 
others, seem to have had the idea, but 
this only shows, as we say, how modern 
the Greeks were. Primitive man in 
general, we are quite certain, preferred 
mystery to order, refused to recognize 
the most obvious causes, and rarely did 
a thing directly if by indirection he 
could get it done more awkwardly. 
Here again we are somewhat checked 
when the archaeologist comes upon some 
primitive implement strangely effective 
— that is, strangely like our imple- 
ments, — or discovers on forgotten cave- 
walls drawings which indicate a remark- 
able eye for things as they still are. 
Yet the mass impression remains, that 

[ 122 ] 



IN LITERATURE 

this life was once a matter of chance or 
luck, and experience was unforeseeable; 
that the race-mind cleared very slowly; 
and that we are the first to imagine a 
universe of complete and unalterable 
law. 

Our complacent attitude toward prim- 
itive man has of late been fostered by 
certain gifted classical scholars, chief 
among them Professor Gilbert Murray 
and Miss Jane Harrison, who with the 
help of anthropology have recreated that 
dim world which lay behind Greek 
letters. The beautiful logic by which 
these scholars reach their results in- 
creases our conceit that reason is a 
modern instrument, while the world they 
picture, a hopeless tangle of religion and 
superstition, of necromancy and the arts, 
reassures us as to what we have risen 
from. Against that sombre background 
Homer, once thought primitive, seems 

[1^3] 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

recent and enlightened. Professor J. A. 
K. Thompson, in his Studies in the Odys- 
sey, pubHshed in 1914, provides us with 
numerous examples. The Homeric epics 
are full of what are called "expurgations" 
of earlier legend. Those stories of bodily 
transformation which Ovid gathered up 
as fairy tales in his Metamorphoses, the 
primitive Greek took quite literally; but 
since the Homeric way of seeing life 
would not countenance this make-be- 
lieve, the transformations were "ex- 
purgated" by being turned into similes. 
When we read in the Odyssey, "So spake 
she and departed, the grey-eyed Athena 
and like an eagle of the sea she flew 
away," we surmise that in an older story 
the goddess turned herself into the sea- 
eagle. The Homeric conscience is re- 
luctant to transmit this account of the 
outer world; the most that can be con- 
ceded is a resemblance between Athena 

[ 124 ] 



IN LITERATURE 

and the sea-eagle. Sometimes, it must 
be confessed, the concession is more 
starthng than the original transforma- 
tion. When Hera and Athena came to 
the plains of Troy to aid the Greeks, we 
are told that "the goddesses went their 
way" into battle ''with step like unto 
turtle-doves." The explanation is that 
as attendants on Zeus, the goddesses had 
originally been imagined in the form of 
his sacred doves. The most helpful 
example, however, of the Homeric ex- 
purgation is the story of Dolon, in the 
tenth book of the Iliad, When Dolon 
set out to spy on the Greeks, he "cast 
on his shoulders his crooked bow, and 
put on thereover the skin of a grey wolf, 
and on his head a helm of ferret-skin, 
and took a sharp javelin, and went on his 
way to the ships." In the Iliad that 
grey wolf-skin is only a garment. But 
in the Rhesus of Euripides, which appears 

[125] 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

to follow the earlier legends, Dolon ex- 
plains his device to the chorus: 

"Over my back a wolf -skin will I draw, 
And the brute's gaping jaws shall frame my 

head: 
Its forefeet will I fasten to my hands, 
Its legs to mine; the wolf's four-footed gait 
I'll mimic, baffling so our enemies, 
While near the trench and pale of ships I am; 
But whenso to a lone spot come my feet, 
Two-footed will I walk." 

Here the wolf-skin is a disguise, which, 
though not in itself magical, carries us 
nearer to that primitive age when stealthy 
men, for their own purposes, changed 
into were- wolves, and when every wild 
beast, therefore, implied a fearful pos- 
sibility that it was a man transformed. 
From such illuminating glimpses into 
the early world we make the con- 
clusion that primitive man dwelt in 
mystery, that he was fond of make- 
believe, that he had a highly developed 

[126] 



IN LITERATURE 

sense of magic — in other words, that he 
looked for dehghtful shortcuts and es- 
capes from the facts of Hfe, whereas we 
look for the law which explains and con- 
trols the facts. But the truth probably 
is that primitive man had no sense of 
magic whatever; when he busied himself 
with his incantations and his hocus-pocus, 
he probably had a quite modern sense of 
cause and effect. To us he seems a 
magician, because his method of getting 
at the cause or at the effect was not 
ours ; but he had no measure by which to 
judge himself. He consulted the medi- 
cine-man as we consult the doctor, and 
his faith was no more shaken than ours 
is by a failure to cure. It is the con- 
ception of magic, not the conception of 
cause and effect, which has grown with 
time and enlightenment. Now, and only 
now, can we realize how much of prim- 
itive science was really magic; but in the 

[127] 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

essential desire to have a science — that 
is, to control and ameliorate our destiny 
by calculated means, it is not clear that 
we differ from our ultimate ancestors. 

In one respect, however, we ought to 
differ from them. If time has provided 
us with a criticism of magic, of illegitimate 
and ineffective attempts at power, it 
should have taught us also to admire 
what is lawful, effective, and true. If 
primitive literature, recording an in- 
comprehensible world, yearned after mag- 
ic, our records, of a world understood, 
should be full of wonder — that is, full 
of idealizing joy in the truth and in the 
beauty before our eyes. Time should 
have distinguished us so from earlier 
man, because the ability to wonder comes 
late. To be sure, the Rousseau senti- 
mentalists imagined the savage as con- 
templating the heavens and the earth 
beneath with astonishment and awe, and 

[128] 



IN LITERATURE 

they drew substance for their fancy from 
the supposed exaltation of spirit with 
which young children make their ac- 
quaintance with this planet. But noth- 
ing in our observation of children or in 
the anthropologist's observation of prim- 
itive men, would allow much truth in 
this old doctrine; the very contrary 
seems to be the fact — that only the 
sophisticated can appreciate the miracles 
that are actually before our eyes. Chil- 
dren take their world for granted; when 
we disclose some amazement at life, some 
awe of facts, it is a sign that we are no 
longer children. Moreover, we wonder 
only at what lies on the border of our 
experience; what is totally beyond us 
we still take for granted. The unclothed 
savage of Borneo is brought to the settle- 
ments and treated to a ride in a motor- 
car. Knowing nothing of such things, 
he is neither surprised nor interested, 

[ 129 ] 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

but lets the car, like gravitation, do its 
work. But he gapes for hours at a steel 
hammer or a serviceable saw. 

Our pity, then, for primitive man's de- 
fective science, hardly covers the situa- 
tion. Surely we can forgive the first 
comers for taking hold by the wrong 
handles; we still revise our methods- 
But what if we, who think of the universe 
as a realm of law, feel toward it no great 
wonder, not even a hearty approval, but 
still yearn after a magic, after an escape 
of some kind from the inexorable logic 
of life; what if we, who know the ma- 
jestic fidelity wherewith nature keeps 
her elements true to themselves, still 
desire, in the most spiritual things, an 
outworn alchemy! I wish to raise the 
question whether the literature even of 
modern times, far from expressing won- 
der, does not express a certain unwilling- 
ness to face the world we know; whether 

[.130 ] 



IN LITERATURE 

it does not display a tendency to make 
use — a more subtle use — of those prim- 
itive transformations which Homer re- 
jected; whether it does not show a per- 
verse delight in substituting the miracu- 
lous for the normal — preferring, that is, 
to give such an account of the outer and 
inner world as we know to be false, in- 
stead of the account which we know to 
be true. 

I ask your attention, then, to the in- 
consistency between our faith that the 
universe is orderly and wonderful, and 
our pleasure in that literature which 
represents life as miraculous and magical 
—between, that is, our conviction that 
miracles are the measure of wonder, and 
our disposition to treat them as the 
products of magic. The difference is 
great. If we love the poetry of life, 
there is a sense in which we cannot get 
along without miracles; without them as 

[131] 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

a language to talk with, we cannot ex- 
press that profound wonder at common 
facts which is the sign of enlightened 
manhood. For this reason we are un- 
willing to give up fairy stories or the 
legend of Santa Claus, until some other 
language is provided for dreams and as- 
pirations. We boldly make use of mir- 
acles to express or interpret life. But 
to account for life by miracles is stupid 
and unnecessary. Plutarch says that 
on the farm of Pericles a ram was found 
having a single horn. Lampon the 
soothsayer declared that Pericles, by this 
omen, would become sole ruler in Athens. 
But an annoying person named Anaxa- 
goras split the ram's skull in two, and 
showed that by a peculiar formation the 
horn had to grow single. So Anaxagoras 
confuted the soothsayer. But later Peri- 
cles did become ruler, and the sooth- 
sayer recovered his authority. Plutarch's 

[132] 



IN LITERATURE 

comment is that they were both right, 
for one explained how the horn grew, 
and the other explained what it meant — 
just as, when the dinner-bell rings, we 
know how the sound is produced, and 
we know what it means. It would be 
stupid, however — though I believe some 
philosophers have been guilty — ^to con- 
fuse the interpretation with the cause, 
to say it is the significance of the dinner- 
bell that is ringing it. The quarrel with 
the miraculous in literature, therefore, 
is only with the miraculous when used as 
magic — as a wilful substitute for that 
continuity of cause and effect which out- 
side of literature we believe in. 



II 

Of this kind of magic it is easy to find 
illustrations in medieval literature. Cer- 
tain well-known French lays of the 

[133] 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

twelfth or thirteenth century picture just 
such an irresponsible, accidental world 
as we usually ascribe to primitive man. 
In one story a fair lady is shut up in a 
tower, that she may not see her lover. 
As she is bemoaning her fate, a mag- 
nificent eagle flies through the narrow 
window, and lighting on the chamber 
floor, turns into a handsome young man, 
her persevering suitor. In another story 
a fair lady is imprisoned, and her true 
knight, instead of coming himself in a 
magic disguise, sends to her a wonderful 
swan, which flies back and forth between 
the two, carrying always a letter beneath 
his plumage. In another story a man 
confides to his wife that during his fre- 
quent absences from home he turns him- 
self into a were-wolf, and she straight- 
way contrives that the next time he shall 
not resume his human form. Here are 
such transformations as we glanced at in 

[134] 



IN LITERATURE 

pre-Homeric legend, but no attempt at 
the Homeric expurgation is here, unless 
the swan in the second story be such. 
Far from desiring any expurgation, the 
medieval audience may have been glad 
enough that literature should not give 
an accurate account of their life. They 
may have liked mystery for its own 
sake, as there is little reason to think 
primitive man ever did. Their faculty 
of wonder, we know, they exercised in 
contemplating the world to come; if, 
as we suspect, they rejoiced in this 
present life also with an almost renais- 
sance paganism, at least they rejoiced 
surreptitiously. It is incredible that they 
did not recognize as magic such episodes 
as we have just summarized; and if this 
material was as frankly magical to them 
as it now seems to us, it is a fact of some 
importance that the middle ages left 
us few pictures of the world as it was 

[135] 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

actually seen. We are sometimes told 
that in those unlucky centuries the 
Church imposed miracles and legends on 
secular ignorance. Whether or not those 
centuries were unlucky, a reading of these 
secular stories suggests wonder that more 
miracles and legends were not imposed 
on the Church. 

But however the twelfth century may 
have understood its literature, there is 
little doubt that the fourteenth century 
liked a certain class of stories which 
must have been recognized as false to 
experience. I refer to those tales of 
reckless or scandalous love — merry tales, 
as the Elizabethan translators would call 
them — such as Boccaccio included in a 
part of his famous collection. Their real 
immorality is not often observed, nor is 
it obvious in any single story; but when 
one reflects on all such stories as a class, 
whether in the Decameron or in other 

[136] 



IN LITERATURE 

collections, the amazing thing is that 
though they picture villainy, cruelty, and 
treachery, they picture no effects of vil- 
lainy, cruelty, or treachery; their es- 
capades continue to be merry; there is 
no hint of possible tragedy for man nor 
of pity for woman. To be sure, the 
medieval story-teller does chronicle sor- 
row, and he does treat womanhood sym- 
pathetically, but never when dealing with 
such themes as we are thinking of. Pa- 
tient Griselda is a medieval heroine; 
Tess of the D'Urbervilles is not. The 
middle ages, moreover, defined tragedy 
as a fall from good fortune to bad, and 
comedy as a rise from bad fortune to 
good; doubtless God punished the wicked 
and rewarded the righteous, but in His 
own miraculous way, not in the inherent 
consequences of a moral choice. It is 
only by the caprice of her husband that 
Griselda is rewarded; to a dramatic 

I . [137] 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

imagination she seems not so much re- 
warded as tortured. 

In the Renaissance there was a con- 
ception of virtue which carried with it 
a behef, if not in a miraculous world in 
general, at least in a special magic or 
talisman for the individual. To the 
Greek mind a virtue was a state, a con- 
dition between two extremes, and Re- 
naissance philosophers, piously accepting 
Aristotle's terms, continued to speak of 
virtue as a mean. But the imaginative 
literature of the Renaissance, in which 
we get the less academic account of life, 
has a tendency to speak of virtue, not as 
a quality or condition, but as a thing, to 
be acquired and possessed. The Renais- 
sance man is not courageous — ^he has 
courage; the Renaissance woman is not 
beautiful — she has beauty. Whether this 
idea of virtue brought about the belief in 
a magic or talisman, or whether the 

[138] 



IN LITERATURE 

belief in a magic, helped by Platonic 
ideas, brought about this conception of 
virtue, it is at least clear that beauty, 
courage, friendship, or any other virtue, 
is often treated in Renaissance literature 
as a magical instrument, like the en- 
chanted spears and shields of medieval 
romance. In the Provencal tradition 
beauty was such a magic. The story 
of Aucassin and Nicolete, which though 
medieval in date is renaissance in spirit, 
tells how Nicolete passed by the door 
where a pilgrim lay sick, and the sight 
of her made him a well man. In the 
Faerie Queene, when Artegal is jousting 
with Britomart, he happens to strike off 
the front of her helmet. Her divine 
beauty causes his sword to fall powerless, 
and he is taken captive. In Paradise 
Lost, when the serpent approaches to 
tempt Eve, her loveliness renders the 
devil, for one moment, stupidly good. 

[139] 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

Nicolete and Britomart had a per- 
manent magic; Eve's beauty was effec- 
tive only for a moment. Milton was 
skeptical of magic, not only because he 
came late in the Renaissance, but be- 
cause he had an unusual intellect, and a 
mathematician's sense for order. In him 
the tradition of virtue as a talisman or 
miraculous instrument temporarily died 
out. For example, chivalry had fostered 
a belief in the magic of being right, the 
magic on which the institution of judicial 
combat was founded. He who had the 
right in any encounter must of necessity 
prevail. This institution was accepted 
throughout Spenser's Faerie Queene; un- 
less they had first committed a sin or 
fallen into an error, the good champions 
could not be overcome by the powers 
of evil. We remember, in passing, how 
Scott accommodated this large faith to 
modern skepticism, killing off the Tem- 

[140] 



IN LITERATURE 

plar by a stroke of apoplexy just in time 
to save Ivanhoe. It might have been 
thought that Shakspere, who was closer 
than most men to the realities of experi- 
ence, would have taken the edge off the 
miracle, as Scott did; but in As You 
Like It Orlando, having a just cause, is 
able to throw the professional wrestler. 
It remained for Milton to reject magic. 
To see how far he advanced beyond 
Spenser, for example, we have but to 
imagine how Spenser would have written 
Comus. The heroine of the poem, an- 
other Britomart, possessing the heaven- 
ly virtue of chastity, would have been 
armed against the spells of the sorcerer. 
All that Milton claims in the end, though 
he starts out bravely, is that the lady's 
soul was unharmed, though Comus did 
enchant her body. This concession is 
larger than at first might appear, for it 
contradicts the fine boast of the elder 

[141] 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

brother, who in the poem speaks for 
Milton— 

"Against the threats 
Of malice or of sorcery, or that power 
Which erruig men call chance, this I hold firm: 
Virtue may be assailed, but never hurt. 
Surprised by unjust force, but not enthralled. 

Yet virtue is enthralled, and it is the 
grace of heaven, not the lady's innocence, 
that releases her. In Paradise Lost Mil- 
ton still clings, poet-like, to the magic of 
beauty, but the magic of being right he 
gives over, preferring to read man's 
fortunes dramatically, as the inevitable 
result of his choice among fixed laws. 
He holds to the dramatic attitude in 
Sampson Agonistes, although he does rep- 
resent the giant's strength as still resid- 
ing in his hair. This survival of primi- 
tive magic, however, is only figurative, a 
symbol of moral power lost and regained. 
Having given his allegiance to what he 

[1421 



IN LITERATURE 

believed was a righteous cause, and hav- 
ing seen that cause collapse, Milton 
could but agree with Sir Thomas Browne, 
that a man may be in as just possession 
of truth as of a city, and yet be forced 
to surrender. 



Ill 

But the career of magic was not over. 
Milton rejected it, as Homer had done, 
as Scott did later, and many another in- 
dividual here and there; but it is not 
for their rejection of magic that Homer 
or Milton or Scott has been widely 
praised. We have advanced far enough 
to ask that our talismans be of a less 
obvious kind than satisfied men a thou- 
sand years ago, but a talisman of some 
kind we still delight in. Witness three 
novelists, undeniably great, who are sup- 
posed to account for life genuinely and 

[143] 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

honestly, yet who show a certain reluc- 
tance to accept the universe of order, and 
hark back rather to the old magical 
transformation. 

One of these novelists is Fielding. 
Criticism has stressed his manliness, his 
insistence on frankness, his ability to 
deal with a fact. Yet in none of his 
stories, except Jonathan Wild, does he 
treat his heroes as though character 
were really conditioned by causes and 
consequences. We watch the good and 
the bad traits in Tom Jones, for the first 
twenty-five years of his life, and then 
we are asked to believe that, once hap- 
pily married, he reformed, and his faults 
not only disappeared, but obligingly left 
no traces. In Amelia we must believe 
the same miracle of Booth, with the 
added difficulty that he is older when he 
reforms. In the minor details of both 
stories, as also in Joseph Andrews^ there 

[144] 



IN LITERATURE 

is a lucky juxtaposition of events to help 
out the character, which suggests the 
fairy godmother rather than the observer 
of this world. No ill effects result from 
bad choices, and good fortune is not the 
result of wisdom in the characters, but 
of benevolence in the author. Fielding 
has had his reputation from his hearty 
interest in life and his advance in verisi- 
militude over his predecessors. Looking 
back now, however, we see that his 
interest in life was neither wide nor deep, 
and that he had no use for the conception 
of the world as a sequence of inexorable 
justice; he preferred to think of it as a 
career where manliness was a suflSicient 
talisman^ — where the effects of conduct 
suspended themselves for a possibly err- 
ing heart, so long as it was stout. 

To make a similar criticism of Dickens 
requires some resolution, for he enlists 
our loyalty as Fielding never does. 

[ 145] 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

Our affection convinces us rightly that 
whatever the Hterary critic may pro- 
nounce upon David Copperfield or Old 
Curiosity Shop or Our Mutual Friend, the 
emotions which those books stirred in us 
were noble. The fact is that Dickens 
uses the miraculous in both ways at once, 
as an interpretation and as an account 
of life. With him the same incident 
serves to state an ideal and to chronicle 
a fact. If only his facts had been cor- 
rect, he would have illustrated the per- 
fect formula of art. As it is, we fall in 
love with his ideals; and we learn better 
than to believe his picture of life. He 
accounted for experience, and explained 
it, by the simple magic of goodness. 
Before a good man, the problems of this 
world melt away. There is a wide dif- 
ference between this goodness and the 
old chivalric magic of being right. If one 
is right, at least one is in unconscious 

[146] 



IN LITERATURE 

accord with the facts and the laws of 
the universe. In Dickens the admirable 
characters are often mistaken, even hor- 
ribly in the wrong, but they are good, 
and so long as they remain good they 
excite admiration and surmount diffi- 
culties. The illustrations of this magic 
occur in the most characteristic parts of 
Dickens' work — in the Christmas Carol, 
for example. To read this story for its 
emotions is to learn generosity and 
brotherly love; but how disconcerting 
to learn our virtues from a false picture 
of life! Do misers like Scrooge repent? 
Can anyone turn over a new leaf and 
undo all his past? And does such good- 
ness as Tiny Tim's or Bob Cratchit's 
really solve the difficulties of their situa- 
tion as completely as Dickens represents? 
The pity that we feel for Tiny Tim is a 
tribute to what is true in the story; 
the comfortable optimism with which 

[147] 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

we put down the book, is evidence of 
some trick of magic, some eluding of 
truth — for looking at men and women 
around us, we are convinced that such 
satisfaction is not reached that way. 
Besides, we have learned to think that 
people in poverty or misery are still in 
trouble even though they are brave about 
it; if we could agree that goodness is a 
talisman, we might as well give up all 
social work, on the ground that the 
worthy poor are as happy as possible, 
and the unhappy poor must be unworthy. 
What Dickens has done, then, is to 
state his ideals in terms of what pretends 
to be real experience. Our admiration 
cannot be withheld from the ideals, nor 
can our intelligence endorse the account 
of life. If it is a fairy story that we are 
reading, we ought not to be deceived 
into mistaking it for history. There is 
reason to think, however, that Dickens 

[148] 



IN LITERATURE 

did not consider it a disadvantage to 
be the victim of illusion. At least he 
portrayed many "illusionists," as a Ger- 
man scholar called them, who tabulated 
and classified them all. Mr. Pickwick, 
Mrs. Nickleby, Swiveller, Tom Pinch, 
David Copperfield, and of course Mr. 
Micawber, are among the illusionists. 
The French critic Taine made the same 
point by saying that many characters 
in Dickens have a touch of insanity. 

In the world as Dickens represents it, 
these illusioned characters get on very 
well, but in the real world they come to 
grief. Of such disillusion Thackeray is 
the kindliest example. At least he repre- 
sents a partial reaction from the magic of 
goodness; he can no longer believe in it, 
but he wishes with all his heart he could. 
What really happens to absolute good- 
ness in this world is portrayed, not in 
Bob Cratchit, nor in David Copperfield, 

[149] 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

but in Colonel Newcome. With magic 
Thackeray is convinced, we might say, 
that the novel should have nothing to do, 
yet he devotes his art to no religion of 
wonder. Because he has so gently and 
persuasively corrected Dickens' picture 
of life, at the same time endorsing, as it 
were, his ideals, Thackeray has had 
much reputation for wisdom and modern- 
ness. Yet in the cardinal emotions of 
wonder and delight he is not modern at 
all; the logic of character, the unalter- 
able order, whereby Colonel Newcome 
suffered for his mistakes, however excel- 
lent his motives — this saddens Thack- 
eray, even though he is in honor bound 
to present it. For an ordered universe 
he has no love, nor any passion for the 
career of the mind. Perhaps it is only 
his sentimentality that hides from us the 
materialism in his picture of life — the 
implication that the good are victims of 

[150] 



IN LITERATURE 

inevitable laws; whereas they are really 
victims of their own ignorance. The 
laws of human nature, if Colonel New- 
come were only wise enough to make 
them the instruments of happiness, would 
seem reliable, to wonder at, rather than 
inexorable, to fear. 

Of stories and plays written in our 
own time it is enough to say that few 
of them show any persuasion that there 
is consequence in the world. If you 
open any of the numerous manuals 
which tell you how to write fiction, you 
may read that actions should be mo- 
tivated, that there should be reasons 
why things happen — as though cause and 
effect were subdivisions of the literary 
art. Few of our contemporary writers 
seem to practise this instruction, and 
still fewer of their readers know whether 
they practise it or not. We have with 
us still, of course, special schools of 

[151] 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

fiction, which insist on a precise or a 
continuous or an unselected rendering of 
experience — reaHstic and naturahstic 
schools; and individual masters of real- 
ism or naturalism from time to time 
captivate many readers. But even these 
individual successes, added together, seem 
to make no total impression on the read- 
ing world. In contemporary fiction char- 
acters slough off the past, serpent-like, 
and emerge brighter than ever; or they 
change their nature in a twinkling; and 
it seems that few readers seriously pro- 
test against the miracle. Our supposed 
faith in the logic of personality, our 
faith that a given character will act in a 
certain way, our faith especially that a | 
man's conduct or occupation influences 
his character, that he is marked by what 
he does — all this we seem to have sur- 
rendered, substituting in its place a ^j 
misty benevolence, a magic of the Dick- 

[ 152 ] i 



IN LITERATURE 

ens type, a persuasion that any char- 
acter, viewed sympathetically, will seem, 
or will actually become, as admirable as 
any other character. 

One illustration may be found in the 
stories of the underworld, where the 
professional criminal or wrongdoer is 
shown in the final paradox to be essen- 
tially righteous and permanently re- 
formed. We are convinced, of course, 
that to be a professional crook will in 
the end lead to some moral deterioration. 
We read with pleasure, however, these 
fables which keep the soul of the crook 
unspotted from his own conduct. Our 
pleasure is based on a fine humaneness, 
on the undoubted fact that criminals are 
largely manufactured or at least en- 
couraged by circumstances, and that few 
of them were originally bad at heart. 
But this doctrine, excellent as a vantage- 
point from which to enter upon social 

[153] 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

responsibility and rescue, has been 
stretched in our fiction until it misrepre- 
sents the consequences of wrongdoing, 
and even diminishes, strangely enough, 
that sense of social responsibility from 
which it sprang. We felt to blame for 
letting our fellow-man become a crimi- 
nal, but after the story or the play has 
demonstrated how excellent morally the 
criminal is, we feel less guilty. In such 
tales, however, there is always an in- 
consistency; the hero is singled out for 
admiration, but his comrades in guilt 
are saved by no miracle — so much is 
conceded to our general knowledge of J 
the facts. I 

Another illustration may be drawn 
from a very different region of interest, 
from those stories or plays, like The 
Passing of the Third Floor Back, or 
The Servant in the House, which show the 
miraculous influence of a perfect char- 

[154] 



IN LITERATURE 

acter. In such fiction a stranger is 
represented as entering a community, a 
group of people formed and settled, and 
by the magic of his presence transmuting 
them into quite different persons. This 
kind of story must express some precious 
ideal, or it would not be so tenderly 
popular; but as a picture of life it is 
both incorrect and immoral, for it both 
contradicts our experience and relieves 
us — ^provided we can entertain the stran- 
ger — of responsibility for our conduct. 
To be sure, the public thinks this type 
of story far from immoral — ^rather a 
religious parable, for does not the author 
suggest that the stranger is Christ .^^ 
And does not that suggestion explain 
the miracles.^ But here we see how an 
inclination to magic befuddles our ordi- 
nary intelligence. Because the stranger 
converts everybody he meets, we think 
he is Christ-like, forgetting that the 

[155] 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

New Testament gives no such account 
of Christ. 



IV 



Perhaps the contrast has been in- 
dicated sufficiently between the universe 
of law which we are supposed to believe 
in, and the world of magic which we 
like to read about. What does this in- 
consistency mean? Perhaps it is rash 
to venture on so large a question in so 
short a space, but in this balancing of 
magic against wonder a conviction steals 
on one that the love of magic, though it 
may be stupid, indicates something far 
higher than stupidity. The connota- 
tions of the words themselves convince 
us. Magic suggests power, however ob- 
tained, whereas wonder suggests no pow- 
er at all. Is there such merit in en- 
lightenment if one is to be, after all, 

[156] 



IN LITERATURE 

only an enlightened bystander? The 
magician at least wanted control of 
experience — and so do we ! Magic 
sought to engage the help of alien forces, 
foreign gods, in the problems of this 
world; we, believing that no gods are 
alien to our universe, ought logically to 
make the remotest force effective in our 
daily aspirations; we cannot stop with a 
passive wonder. Or if we do, our sym- 
pathies, and the sympathy of our fel- 
lows, will return to magic, which with 
all its defects dreamt of power. 

When we consider how many noble 
intellects have tried in vain to take from 
the race its love of magic, and to teach 
it instead the habit of wonder, the long 
failure can be explained, I think, by the 

fact that the ideal of wonder has rarely 
included the ideal of control, without 
which we refuse to be fascinated. This 
is true of the philosophers, who though 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

they have sought to correct all hap- 
hazard and irresponsible impressions of 
the universe, yet have so far failed, in 
that they have not greatly disturbed 
man's love of magical stories. Some of 
them, Francis Bacon, for example, have 
opened up visions of scientific control 
more magical than magic itself; we shall 
owe it to them eventually that our magic 
and our wonder have become identical. 
But most philosophers have been content 
to attack the ignorance of magic without 
satisfying its aspiration; and the wonder 
which they would substitute, though 
nobly imaginative, has stopped short of 
that power men yearn for. Lucretius 
serves for example, whose poem on the 
Nature of Things sought to take away 
our fear of death by removing our faith 
in immortality — or, as he would say, our 
superstition. This intended service has 
not roused the gratitude of mankind. 

[158] 



IN LITERATURE 

What stirs us in the poem is the vision 
of an ordered world, and an impassioned 
rebuke that the vision has not stirred 
us before. To feed our sense of wonder 
we have had recourse to fairy tales; 
but, says the poet, *'Look up at the 
bright and unsullied hue of heaven, and 
the stars which it holds within it, wan- 
dering about, and the moon and the 
sun's light of dazzling brilliancy; if all 
these things were now for the first time 
suddenly presented to mortals, what 
could have been named that would be 
more marvelous?" Here is an escape 
from ignorance, if you please, a sense 
of wonder in the presence of the actual 
universe; but when we have felt this 
wonder, what next? Having got rid of 
our superstitions, shall we then be ready 
to die? 

The same criticism can be made of 
\ Milton, the one English poet comparable 

[159] 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

with Lucretius in loftiness and fervor. 
His sense of reality, as we saw, kept him 
from believing in magic; his special gift, 
it seems, was for wonder on an infinite 
scale. But he stops with wonder; he 
would not have mankind seek knowledge 
for the magic purpose of control. When 
Adam voices his suspicion that the sun, 
the moon, and the stars, are not circling 
the earth, as they appear to be doing, 
for the sole uneconomic purpose of fur- 
nishing light for one man and his wife, 
Raphael replies with a superb summary 
of both the Ptolemaic and the Coper- 
nican theories, but he advises Adam not 
to bother his head with either hypothesis, 
nor to prosecute any scientific inquiry. 
The great Architect, he says, 

"Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge 
His secrets to be scann'd by them who ought 
Rather admire. . . . 

Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid, 
Leave them to God above, Him serve and fear." 

[160] 



IN LITERATURE 

That Milton, himself pre-eminently a 
thinker and a student, should have repre- 
sented the powers of good as opposed 
to enquiry, has greatly puzzled his ad- 
mirers. We should like to find an argu- 
ment on the other side in Adam's reply 
to the angel, 

"To know 
That which before us lies in daily life 
Is the prime wisdom." 

We should like to translate this speech 
into a praise of practical science, of 
enquiry which has for object the control 
of one's destiny. But there is nothing 
in the context to aid this interpretation. 
If the philosophers have not lured us 
to a reasonable view of life, the satirists 
have not driven us to it. Wherever 
satire has dealt with man's ignorance, it 
has attacked magic in some form. Even 
magic-lovers themselves, as to some ex- 

[161] 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

tent Fielding and Thackeray were, have 
appealed to the inexorable order when 
they wrote satirically, as in Jonathan 
Wild and Barry Lyndon, The stock in 
trade of George Bernard Shaw today 
is our persisting trust in magic formulas. 
The substance of his art is but to prick 
that bubble. In Androcles and the Lion, 
for example, he gives a reading of Chris- 
tian martyrdom in what professes to be 
the unchanging law of character; his 
audience wonder why he should have\ 
demonstrated the obvious, and they re- 
mark as they go home that he is losing his 
old sparkle. But they have applauded 
with spontaneous and unembarrassed 
delight that moment in the play where 
the lion refuses to eat Androcles — which 
proves, I suppose, that they have fallen 
into Shaw's trap. Yet with all this 
clever exposing of our inconsistencies, 
the satirist gives us no vision of what 

[162] 



IN LITERATURE 

life would be like, were we to make in- 
telligent use of the laws we profess to 
believe in. 

Here and there, however, poets have 
given us glimpses of the vision. Such 
a poet is Shelley. We do not usually 
praise him for a sense of fact. Yet few 
men have tried so honestly to give their 
enthusiasms to the proper objects, or 
have contemplated with such genuine 
rapture the control over experience which 
a knowledge of nature's order should 
give. His education in science was am- 
ateurish and fragmentary, but no special- 
ist conceives more clearly or more rap- 
turously the magic possibilities of exact 
knowledge. For Shelley, science was to 
be the key to nature's secrets, and those 
secrets, once known, were to subject 
nature to man. The fullest expression 
of this faith is in Prometheus Unbound, 
the last act of which, in praise of what 

[163] 



MAGIC AND WONDER 

may be called scientific living, might be 
read as a commentary on The Newcomes, 

"Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul, 
Whose nature is its own divine control. 
Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea; 
Familiar acts are beautiful through love; 
Labor, and pain, and grief, in life's green grove 
Sport hke tame beasts, none knew how gentle 
they could be! 



AU things confess man's strength — ^Through the 

cold mass 
Of marble and of color his dreams pass; 
Bright threads whence mothers weave the robes 

their children wear; 
Language is a perpetual Orphic song. 
Which rules with Dsedal harmony a throng 
Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and 

shapeless were. 

The lightning is his slave; heaven's utmost deep 
Gives up her stars, and Uke a flock of sheep 
They pass before his eye, are numbered, and 

roU on! 
The tempest is his steed, he strides the air; 
And the abyss shouts from her depth laid bare. 
Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; 

I have none. 

[164] 



IN LITERATURE 

Such a poet, to name a second, is 
Emerson. He, also, is not famous for 
any grasp on reality. His fame, however, 
does him injustice. He was indeed a 
mystic, and much of his teaching seems 
to belittle the facts of life, the terms on 
which we move in this present world. 
But he did not belittle facts, nor under- 
value whatever is actual. There is no 
real power, he taught, which is not 
based on nature, and the beginning of 
power is the belief that things go not 
by luck, but by law. Even when the 
mystic in him was uppermost, he often 
meant in a nobly practical way what 
we have taken as an extravagance of 
idealism. "Hitch your wagon to a star." 
We translate "aim high" — ^but that was 
not his meaning. He meant that we 
should be scientific, if you choose — ^that 
having learned to wonder at the laws 
and forces of the universe, we should 

[165] 



MAGIC AND WONDER m 

then turn the laws to our advantage 
and should ourselves control the forces. 
These are his words: "I admire the skill 
which, on the seashore, makes the tides 
drive the wheels and grind corn, and 
which thus engages the assistance of the 
moon, like a hired hand, to grind, and 
wind, and pump, and saw, and split 
stone, and roll iron. Now that is the 
wisdom of a man, in every instance 
of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a 
star." 

Here is an invitation to a greater power 
than magic, and here, I think, is a fore- 
taste of what poetry may be. Lucretius 
stood in awe before the universe, but he 
stood aloof; Shelley and Emerson, mod- 
ern of the moderns, beheld man entering 
into control of a vaster universe than 
the Roman poet merely contemplated. 
When literature expresses the miracle of 
that control, our common life will be 

[1661 



IN LITERATURE 

transfigured in wonder, our dreams will 
lie, not in the impossible, but in the 
path of our happy destiny, and the gods 
will walk with us. 



THE END 



311-77-9 



CONGRESS 




